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HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 
OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE 

No. 18 

Editors : 

HERBERT FISHER, M.A., F.B.A. 
Prof. GILBERT MURRAY, Litt.D., 

LL.D., F.B.A. 
Prof. J. ARTHUR THOMSON, M.A. 
Prof. WILLIAM T. BREWSTER, M.A. 



THE HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 
OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE 

VOLUMES NOW READY 

HISTORY or "WAR AM) PEACE . G. H. Peebis 

POLAR EXPLORATION Db.W.B.Bbucb,LL.D.,F.R,S.E. 

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION . . . H11.AIBE Belloo, M.A. 
THE STOCK EXCHANGE : A Shobt 

Studt or Invbstmbnt and Spkoulaxion F. W. Hiest 

IRISH NATIONALITY Amcb Stopfobd Gbbbn 

THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT ... J. Ramsat MaoDonald, M.P. 
PARLIAMENT : Its Histoet, Constitu- 

TION, and PEACTICB • SiB COTJETENAT ILBBBT, K.C.B., 

K.C.S.I. 
MODERN GEOGRAPHY ..... Maeion L Nkwbigik, D.Sc, 

(Lond.) 

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE .... John Masbfield. 
THE EVOLUTION OF PLANTS . . D.H.Scott,M.A.,LL.D.,F.R.S. 
THE OPENING-UP OF AFRICA . . Sm H. H. Johnston, G.C.M.G., 

K.C.B., D.Sc, F.Z.S. 

MEDIEVAL EUROPE H. "W. C. Davis, M.A. 

THE SCIENCE OF WEALTH . . . J. A. Hobson, M.A. 
INTRODUCTION TO MATHEMATICS A. N. Whitbhbad, So.D. F.R.S. 
THE ANIMAL WORLD . . . . . . F. W. Gambib, D.Sc, F.R.S. 

EVOLUTION J* Aethub Thomson, M.A., and 

Pateick Geddks, M.A. 

LIBERALISM L. T. Hobhodse, M.A. 

CRIME AND INSANITY De. C. A. Mbrciee, F.R.C.P., 

F.R.C.S. 

\* Other volumes in active preparation. List on request 



THE OPENING UP 
OF AFRICA 

SIR H H. JOHNSTON 

G.C.M.G., K.C.B., D.Sc, F.Z.S. 

FORMERLY H.M. CONSUL FOR SOUTHERN NIGERIA AND 
PORTUGUESE EAST AFRICA, COMMISSIONER IN BRIT- 
ISH CENTRAL AFRICA, CONSUL-GENERAL IN 
TUNIS, SPECIAL COMMISSIONER FOR UGANDA, 
ETC.; VICE-PRESIDENT AFRICAN SOCIETY 

AUTHOR OF 

" BRITISH CENTRAL AFRICA," " UGANDA," " LIBERIA," 

" GEORGE GRENFELL AND THE CONGO," ' THE 

NEGRO IN THE NEW WORLD," ETC. 




NEW YORK 
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 

LONDON 
WILLIAMS AND NORGATE 



h\ 






-^'^ 



CONTENTS 

CHAP. PAGE 

Note on Books viii 

I Prehistoric Times 9 

II The Work of Egypt 38 

III The Early Semites 63 

IV The Greeks in Africa ...... 9^ 

V Rome in Africa 102 

VI The Fula, the Songhai, and the Bantu ] 1 5 

VII The Moslem Arabs in Africa . . . 137 

VIII Portugal Opens Up Africa .... 152 

IX The Dutch in Africa 179 

y X The French in Africa 191 

XI The British Work in Africa . . . 215 

XII Belgium, Germany, and Italy . . . 236 

XIII Christian Missions in Africa . . . 242 

XIV Commercial Development 252 

Glossary 255 



IV 

'ubiishdf 



>EC 8 m ^ 



/ 







£¥ 



Sketch-Map of Africa showing; in white the areas of land which 
from ten to fifty thousand years ago were probably covered 
with shallow water-lakes, or inlets of the sea, or were uninhabit- 
able swamps. The sh.ided area hns not been under water to 
any extent since the close of the Tertiary Epoch, 



NOTE ON BOOKS 

SuOH of my readers as are not content to accept my theories 
or quotations of other people's theories "without question, or who 
would like to look into the details of African history, are advised 
to consult the following works : — 

The "Encyclopaedia Britannica," 11th Edition. The many 
articles on African subjects in these volumes (some of which have 
been written by the Author of this book, while others are based 
on information supplied by him) give very full bibliographies of 
original authorities. 

The Author's own works on "British Central Africa;" "A 
History of the Colonization of Africa by Alien Races ; " 
«' Uganda ; " " The Nile Quest ; " " Liberia ; " " George Grenf ell 
and the Congo ; " "A History of the British Empire in Africa ; " 
"The Negro in the New "World" not only deal largely with the 
**opening-up"of Africa and with African history, but also give 
lists of books of reference. 

There should also be read : ** A History of Ancient Geography," 
by Sir E. H. Bunbury; "A Tropical Dependency,'' by Lady 
Lugard ;" British Nigeria," by Lieut. -Col. Mockler-Ferryman ; 
*' Timbuktu the Mysterious," by Felix Dubois; the works on- 
Ancient Egypt by Professor Flinders Petrie; the South 
African histories of G. McCall Theal; the histories of the 
British Colonies in Africa, by Sir C. P. Lucas of the Colonial 
OflBce, and the Annual Colonial Office List ; also " The Story of 
African Exploration," by the late Dr. Eobert Brown (an excellent 
and most readable work) ; " Farming Industries of Cape Colony," 
by Robert Wallace ; " The Partition of Africa," by Dr. J. Scott 
Keltie; the works of Dr. Heinrich Barth, Dr. Nachtigal,' Dr. 
Schweinf iirth : all of which can be got at any well-furnished 
library. There are a great many modern works of importance 
on the ancient and recent history of Africa by French, German, 
Italian and Portuguese authors, which will be found mentioned 
either in the bibliographies attached to Sir Harry Johnston's 
books or those given in the "Encyclopaedia Britannica." Two 
recently published historical compilations will also be found useful 
in regard to such portions as deal with Africa (portions contri- 
buted by authorities of recognized value) : The Times' " Historians' 
History of the World, " and Harmsworth's ' ' History of the World. " 
The Times History contains a most ample catalogue of books 
dealing with Africa. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological 
Institute and of the (British) African Society may be consulted 
with great advantage. 

viii 



THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

CHAPTER I 

PREHISTORIC TIMES 

Why does special interest attach to what 
is styled in colloquial speech " the opening 
up of Africa " ? Because only twenty-five 
years ago Europe and civilized America were 
very slightly acquainted with the greater 
part of the geography, peoples and products 
of Africa, a region of the earth's land surface 
which the explorer Stanley had just nick- 
named " the Dark Continent " ; yet neverthe- 
less since 188-5 African discovery has proceeded 
at a rate so astonishing that there is nothing 
quite comparable to it in the history of human 
civilization. / ^The white man has been aided 
by his own wonderful inventions to traverse 
the wilderness and not die, to combat hostile 
human tribes — some of them separated 
from him in culture by fifty thousand years 
— to exterminate wild beasts and brave the 
attacks of far more deadly insects and 
microbes. Africa to-day, perhaps, is slightly 
better known to the well educated than is 
South America or the central region of Asia. 
9 



10 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

But although this accumulation of know- 
ledge has been mainly achieved within the 
last quarter of a century, the opening up of 
Africa by the Caucasian race did not begin 
with the Portuguese discoveries of the fifteenth 
and sixteenth centuries, the Dutch and 
British settlements 4in South Africa, the 
French and British conquests of Nigeria, 
Stanley's discovery of the Congo Basin, or 
the German and British protectorates over 
East and Central Africa. The white man in 
his Mediterranean and Nordic types has been 
attempting to penetrate Africa for many thou- 
sands of years, for ten thousand years, at any 
rateJT and it is this story of his extraordinary 
perseverance in a dire struggle with great 
natural forces that I propose to tell in these 
pages. 

From such meagre facts as have already 
been collected by scientific investigation we 
are led to form the opinion that the human 
genus was evolved from an ape-like ancestor 
somewhere in Asia, most probably in India, 
but quite possibly in Syria on the one hand, 
or in the Malay Peninsula or Java on the 
other. So far, the nearest approach to a 
missing link between the family of the anthro- 
poid apes and the family of perfected man 
has been found in the island of Java {Pithec- 
anthroyos erectus), but there are slight in- 
dications pointing to Burma or the southern 
part of the Indian Continent as having been 
the birthplace of humanity. The first dis- 



PREHISTORIC TIMES 11 

tinctly human type — Homo primigenius— 
certainly wandered westwards into Europe, 
and his remains, five hundred thousand years 
old it may be, have been found in the Rhine 
Basin near Heidelberg, dating from the begin- 
ning of the Pleistocene or Quaternary epoch. 

Som-cwhere in Asia or in Europe during 
these first ice ages, Homo primigenius devel- 
oped the perfect man — Homo sapiens; and 
Homo sapiens is seemingly the parent of all 
the sub-species or varieties of humanity 
existing at the present day. These are 
divisible, for practical purposes, into four 
groups : the Australoid-Neanderthaloid, the 
Negro, the White Man or Caucasian, and the 
Mongol. - 

The Australoid, represented at the present 
day by the indigenous population of Australia 
and perhaps the Veddahs of Ceylon, comes 
nearest of all living men to the basal stock 
and to Homo primigenius, behind whom lies 
a long vista of semi-humanity till apehood is 
reached in the Miocene. The modern Black 
Australian (though he is a chocolate colour 
rather than black) is very little differentiated 
from the inter-glacial Man of Europe — man 
of the Neanderthal cranium and of the 
early Palaeolithic Age.^ This Australoid type 

^ Homo primigenius, the type of man represented by the 
lower pair recently discovered near Heidelberg, probably 
belonged to the Eolithic stage of culture^ in which stones 
broken by the simplest fracture were used. The recently 
extinct Tasmanians were scarcely beyond the Eolithic 
stage. The Neanderthaloid tyipe, going back to one to two 



12 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

was almost certainly the parent of the White 
man in Europe and Asia, and again gave 
rise to the Negro in India, Malaysia and 
Oceania. 

Possibly also from this same basal stock 
arose the Mongolian or Yellow man, with 
narrow nose, cylindrical hair,i a hairless 
body, slanting eyes and broad cheekbones. 
The Mongolian variety or sub-species wander- 
ing north-west and east from its birthplace 
in South-central Asia mingled with the 
European or Caucasian ^ sub-species and pro- 
duced mixed types, which are well repre- 

hundred thousand years ago in England and in Europe, 
perhaps North Africa, and no douht many parts of Asia, 
had reached the Palaeolithic stage of culture which only 
gave birth to the Neolithic about 20,000 to 10,000 years 
ago. The Neanderthaloid type so often referred to is 
named from the calvarium found in the Neanderthal, 
near Dusseldorf, in the Rhine Valley. 

^ The hair of Australoids and Europeans, if cut into 
segments and looked at under a magnifying glass, is seen 
to be elliptical, or oblong ; the hair of the Mongolian and 
Amerindian is completely, or almost completely, circular ; 
the Negro's hair, on the other hand, is very narrow and 
much flattened, with a strong tendency to curl. 

2 Caucasian is a better general term for the '^^ White" or 
European sub-species of man : since not only is this sub- 
species developed in great physical beauty on the Caucasus 
range of mountains, but both ^^ White " and '^ European '* 
are inaccurate names for a division of the human species 
which, in some of its races, is dark-skinned, and which has 
inhabited anciently many parts of Asia and the north of 
Africa. Still, in the main it is White in its original skin- 
colour, and European in its principal home at the present 
day, and its birthplace in the far-distant past. 



PREHISTORIC TIMES 13 

sented by the aborigines of America (Amerin- 
dians) at the present day, besides permeating 
much of Central and Northern Europe. These 
Caucaso-Mongolians peopled the whole of 
the New World before the true White man 
came there, and a somewhat similar hybrid, 
spread over Malaysia and the Pacific Islands. 
In these regions, the Caucaso-Mongolian 
crossed w4th the Asiatic Negro and the Aus- 
tral oid, and by these mixtures evolved the 
Polynesian and Melanesian races, examples 
of which — mainly Malayo-Polynesian — • 
actually traversed the Indian Ocean many 
centuries ago and colonized Madagascar. 

The Negro sub-species was evolved from an 
Australoid. stock somewhere in Southern 
Asia; and in a remote period of time un- 
doubtedly peopled much of India, Malaysia, 
the great island of New Guinea, and those 
larger Pacific islands situated at no great 
distance by canoe from any continental area. 
Primitive negroids even penetrated through 
Australia to Tasmania, and perhaps by some 
other route to New Zealand. Westwards 
from India the Negro spread through Persia, 
Mesopotamia, Syria and Arabia. There was 
a strong negroid strain — we gather from 
various evidence, chiefly pictorial, and the 
examination of existing types — in the Elam- 
ites of southern Persia and Mesopotamia, 
which penetrated to the Assyrians and even 
to the Jews. It is more probable that 
Tropical Africa was colonized by the negro 



14 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

race by way of Arabia and Syria rather than 
through Europe and Algeria, and perhaps 
colonized at a period before any negroid 
type had penetrated into Southern Europe. 
From Syria the Negro must have radiated 
over the northern and southern shores of the 
Mediterranean. Through Syria and Arabia 
the Negro entered Africa and populated the 
whole of that continent, except the regions 
which were becoming sandy deserts or which 
still lay under shallow water or were hopeless 
swamp. 

The first real awakening of Man seems to 
have come from South-eastern Europe or Asia 
Minor. The White man, evolved from an 
Australoid or Neanderthaloid ancestor, ceased 
— at a guess, some thirty to twenty thousand 
years ago — to live in an absolutely savage 
condition as a mere carnivorous hunter of 
other animals. He developed more elaborate 
ideas regarding the world outside his own 
body — what we call religion; he manufactured 
his implements, instead of making a somewhat 
haphazard use of stones, horns, bones, thorns, 
sticks and shells in their natural condition. He 
tamed and kept domestic animals and rapidly 
developed the art of imitating them, first, by 
gesture, and secondly by drawing and painting. 
Though still devoid of any sense of shame and 
going naked in warm weather, he shielded 
himself from cold and adorned his head and 
body by the skins of the beasts he had slain. 
He devised ornaments for himself and for his 



PREHISTORIC TIMES 15 

women out of feathers, tusks, teeth, shells, 
seeds and pebbles. Armed with his superior 
weapons and possessed with a lust of conquest, 
he soon polished off whatever may have 
remained in Europe of Australoid man or the 
more ape-like traces of Homo primigenius. 
And he drove away — or absorbed by inter- 
marriage — the negroes of the Mediterranean 
Basin, retaining, however, some evidence here 
and there of this intermixture, which may still 
be seen in the dark-eyed, black-and-curly- 
haired peoples of Western and Southern 
Europe. 

The Caucasian ranged right across Asia till 
he reached the waters of the Pacific, and 
perhaps — ^in fact, most probably — crossed 
over, again and again, into North America by 
way of Alaska. He invaded Malaysia and 
penetrated several thousands of years ago 
into the Pacific Islands. At a period removed 
from the present by some twenty-five thousand 
years ^ he seems to have commenced the colon- 
ization of 'North Africa, absorbing the Austral- 
oids and Negroes who may have preceded him. 
Similarly, he had fused with Negroids in 
northern Egypt, Arabia, Syria and Mesopo- 
tamia, and was commencing to colonize 
Abyssinia; having colonized Arabia at a still 
earlier date, and Somaliland. 

North Africa was almost certainly peopled 
at a very ancient period in human history by 
the Neanderthaloid type of man, with heavy 
^ These computations are largely guesswork. 



16 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

projecting brows and a hairy body. Traces 
of this type still persist in parts of northern 
Tunisia and in Morocco, and it underlies the 
composition of the North African people 
generally. Then came from the east or from 
the south the primitive negroes. These were 
followed before long by the first immigration 
of the true White man or Caucasian, from Syria 
(via Egypt) or from Spain or Italy. 

The first white men, or even their immediate 
successors, who occupied the northern parts 
of Africa from Morocco to the Isthmus of Suez, 
probably did not speak any one of the sex- 
denoting languages either of the Aryan family 
or of that group afterwards differentiated into 
the Libyan, Hamitic or Semitic tongues. 
These later types of Palaeolithic or the pioneers 
of Neolithic man may have been like a 
pure-blooded Fula (see Chapter VI) in appear- 
ance and have used a form of speech like 
that of the modern Fula : one in which the 
nouns are divided into classes without any 
distinction of sex. Such classes generally 
represent groups of objects allied by certain 
affinities; such as, for example, those that are 
human or on a par with humanity, and those 
which are not; " high-caste " or " low-caste " 
things; animate or lifeless objects; or the 
*' tree " class; the " water " class; things that 
are long or short; big or small; weak or strong; 
and so forth. " Class " languages of this type 
include the Dravidian tongues of India, the 
Georgian-Lesghian group of the Caucasus 



PREHISTORIC TIMES 17 

Mountains; and it may be that the Lydian or 
Etruscan and the ancient languages of Asia 
Minor, Greece, and the ^gean Islands were 
also of this kind. 

Languages in which the nouns are divided 
into a large or small number of classes each of 
which has its pronoun and adjectival particle 
(the " concord " of philologists) are common 
in West and Central Africa. Noteworthy 
among them are two speech-families that are 
both associated with the introduction of 
superior civilization into Negro Africa. The 
first is the Fula speech, the second the Bantu. 
Of all these the Fula is the most remarkable 
from the point of view of its being a language 
foreign to Negro Africa and especially asso- 
ciated with a white race. It is the opinion 
of some French ethnologists that a speech 
family like the Fula preceded that of the 
Libyan in North Africa. They hold that 
when the Libyans — coming as they did prob- 
ably from the East, for they were at one time, 
thousands of years ago, of kindred race 
and speech with the Amorites and other 
tribes of Palestine and southern Syria — 
conquered and occupied the north of Africa 
and Lower Egypt, they drove southwards the 
preceding Caucasian race which we now know 
as the Fula. These Fula people then travelled 
slowly across the Sahara Desert, conflicting 
or mixing, no doubt, with previous p^^gro or 
negroid inhabitants, and perpetually driven 
onwards by Libyan or Berber attacks, till they 



18 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

finally settled in the valleys of the Upper Niger 
and Senegal, perhaps penetrating farther still 
into the Central Sudan. An eastern branch 
of this race of early Caucasian immigrants, 
which like the Fula absorbed, as it progressed, 
an increasing quantity of negro blood, may 
have been pushed southwards and westwards 
by the invading Hamites of East Africa and 
have originated the Bantu languages in the 
central part of the continent. 

The existing " class " languages of Africa 
extend, with intervals of more primitive negro 
speech, from the mouth of the Senegal to 
Borgu and the vicinity of the Lower Niger, 
and perhaps begin again in places east of the 
Niger and near the Benue. Then follows a 
wide gap of rather degraded negro speech with 
intrusive elements from the north and from 
the Nilotic negroes, and once again travelling 
north-eastwards, in Kordof an, and south-east- 
wards, among the Bantu, we reach fresh 
developments of the " class " languages, the 
last-named of which has covered Central and 
Southern Africa. 

There are two great and very distinct groups 
of sex-denoting languages, the right under- 
standing of which will help us ranch to re- 
constitute the ancient history of the Old 
World. These are the Aryan languages of 
Europe and Asia; and the Libyan-Hamitic- 
Semitic group of South-west Asia, North and 
North-east Africa. These two families of 
speech agree in nothing except the prin- 



PREHISTORIC TIMES 19 

ciple of denoting sex, and sex only [or absence 
of sex], in their division of nouns and in 
the " concord " between nouns, pronouns and 
adjectives. In this matter of the " concord " 
they may exhibit some far back relationship 
with the " class " languages already described. 

But the Libyan or Berber peoples, though 
they may have originated in Syria from the 
same stock as the Hamites and the Semites, 
seem at an early date — perhaps beginning ten 
thousand years ago — to have invaded Spain, 
France, Britain and Ireland, western Germany 
and Denmark. They were the people of the 
menhirs, cromlechs, monoliths, and megaliths. 
In the United Kingdom they absorbed pre- 
existing racial elements and " Iberianized " 
them. The speech of Ireland and Britain 
(except in the east and north, where a language 
and a physical type like Basque may have 
lingered) was quite possibly of a Berber or 
Libyan type, before the arrival of the first 
Aryan Kelts about 3,000 to 4,000 B.C. The 
result of the mingling of the two elements — 
the fair-haired, Nordic Kelt, and the black- 
haired, brown-eyed Iberians — was the Keltic 
languages of Britain as we find them at the 
present day, with a grammar and syntax 
related to that of the existing Berber speech 
while the vocabulary is mainly Aryan. 

A third " white man " element seems to 
have colonized North Africa at a much later 
period, perhaps about 3,500 years ago. This 
was the brown-haired, yellow-moustached. 



20 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

blue-eyed type of Berber which is still so 
frequently met with in Morocco, Algeria and 
Tunis, and which seems even to have pene- 
trated to ancient Egypt and Abyssinia. 
They were first noticed in Egyptian history 
during the XlXth dynasty, and distinguished 
as Tahennu from the Tamahu or darker- 
skinned Libyans. In Mauretania they seem 
to have constituted an aristocratic type, 
never very numerous even at the present 
day (except on the High Atlas), but always 
remarkable by their white skin, grey or blue 
eyes, brown hair and light moustaches. It is 
thought that these blond Berbers came from 
Spain and were Keltiberians, that is to say, a 
blend of the Iberian or Libyan population of 
Spain with early Nordic immigrants — fair- 
haired Kelts who spoke an Aryan tongue. From 
this blend indeed may be derived the un- 
doubted Aryan roots to be found in the Libyan 
tongues of North Africa, rather than from 
borrowed Latin words; except where these 
are obviously of such derivation. 

Thus in the human history of North Africa 
there would seem to have been the following 
layers and courses of immigration : Firstl}^ 
a Neanderthaloid type, akin to the black 
Australian, which may have come from Spain 
or from Syria (more probably the former); 
secondly, the Negro from the east; thirdly, 
the Fula from the east, followed (fourthly) 
by the Libyan from the same direction; and 
fifthly the Keltiberian from Spain. 



PREHISTORIC TIMES 21 

Meantime the sex-denoting languages of 
the Libyan and the Hamitic type (to be suc- 
ceeded afterwards by Semitic) were influencing 
profoundly the speech of the negroes in North- 
east Africa, carrying the principle of sex- 
discrimination in syntax as far into the Sudan 
as the Bahr-al-Ghazal and the Shari-Chad 
basin, where it exists in the Bongo, Hausa, and 
Musgu languages of to-day; while in a more 
southern direction we have it in the Nilotic 
speech, especially of the Bari and Masai 
branches (which extend beyond the Equator), 
and even amongst the Hottentots. These 
last in physique, phonology and other char- 
acteristics are mainly of the Bushman divi- 
sion of the negro race. Some form of Hamitic 
influence in grammar, in domestic animals 
and religious ideas must have been grafted 
at an early date on to a Bushman tribe, 
it may be, in the vicinity of the Victoria 
Nyanza (where click languages are still 
spoken). With their long-horned cattle, 
their fat-tailed sheep, and their language 
denoting the difference between male and 
female, they were driven southwards by some 
racial or physical disturbance (for in those 
days Africa was more volcanic : earthquakes 
and lava floods in the eastern half of Africa 
played a great part in the dispersal of tribes). 
And passing between Lakes Tanganyika and 
Nyasa they found their way across Southern 
Congoland to the Central Zambezi, and thence 
to the arid Atlantic coast near the mouth of 



22 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

the Kunene, becoming more and more Bush- 
man in blood and language as they fought their 
way to the south-west through lands mainly 
peopled by these yellow pygmies, whose click- 
ing speech is scarcely human. Yet these yellow- 
skinned, wrinkled, steatopygous Hottentots 
(the Bushman race of negro has a tendency 
to develop much " adipose tissue " on the 
buttocks) were carrying with them at some 
remote date — perhaps six or seven thousand 
years ago — the first glimmerings of Neolithic 
civilization into Bushman South Africa, then 
in a condition of almost Eolithic civilization. 

Fifty thousand years ago and earlier the 
geography of the African continent would 
have presented a somewhat different appear- 
ance on a map to what it does at the present 
day. Morocco was probably still united to 
the southern extremity of Spain, and a similar 
land-bridge may have subsisted between Tunis, 
Sicily and Malta. The south-west extremity 
of Arabia had drawn very near to the opposite 
coast of Afar, or had even joined it across what 
are now the straits of Bab-al-Mandib. On 
the other hand, the Red Sea possibly com- 
municated with the Mediterranean across the 
Isthmus of Suez and a good deal of the delta 
of the Nile had not yet been formed; there 
was a large lake — a backwater of the Nile — 
covering the depression known as the Fayum, 
in western Egypt, and a considerable incursion 
of the sea into the hinterland of Tunis (the 
region of the Shats or dried-up salt lakes). 



PREHISTORIC TIMES 23 

Other lakes or inland seas were still lingering 
over portions of the Libyan Desert, of the 
Nigerian and the Northern Sahara, and the 
basins of the Upper Congo and Zambezi. 
Lake Chad was much larger than it is at 
the present day, extending north-eastward 
towards the Tibesti Mountains and up the 
valley of the Komadugu into Hausaland and 
south-east over the Shari basin. Human 
movements over the region now known as 
the Sahara Desert would have been obstructed 
by marshes and shallow lakes fed by torrential 
rivers, almost as much as they have since been 
limited by the drying up of this country of 
steppes, flat plains, shallow depressions and 
rocky plateaus ; and by the formation of 
drifting sand where there was once life-giving 
water and vegetable humus. For, fifty thou- 
sand years ago (and less), there existed forests 
of diverse trees in the Sahara, Libyan and 
Nubian deserts, and Egypt was a well-wooded 
country where now it is almost without plant 
life except when artificially irrigated. 

But at this distance of time- from the 
present day (approximately guessed at by 
such calculations as can be made) a desiccation 
was beginning over most parts of Africa. 
This was due to the waning of the glacial grip 
over Europe and a lessening of the rainfall; 
as well as to the piercing by streams of rocky 
barriers which had hitherto blocked the 
outlet into the ocean of land-locked, moisture- 
diffusing lakes. Africa was becoming, through 



24 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

this draining process, much more fitted for 
human habitation ; although over the great 
belt of country between the Red Sea and the 
Atlantic, Nature was commencing to push 
things to one of her customary extremes, and 
was about to render the Sahara, the Libyan, 
and the Arabian deserts a formidable barrier 
between fertile Mauretania, Lower Egypt, and 
Syria on the north, and Tropical Africa and 
Arabia Felix, with their heavy rainfall, on 
the south. The shallow lakes dried up and 
left deposits of salt or soda in their place; 
the rivers ceased to flow above ground, the 
forests withered and died, the bared soil was 
exposed to the ravages of occasional cloud- 
bursts of heavy rain which washed it away, 
and the absence of trees and herbs made the 
climate one of extremes with blazing hot days 
and bitter cold nights. These alternations 
of heat and cold cracked and crumbled the 
bare rocks. The same causes created winds 
of tremendous force which ground the crum- 
bling rocks into sand; and so these great 
deserts were formed in Arabia and North 
Africa, and became a means of cutting off 
and isolating Tropical Africa from the coun- 
tries bordering on the Mediterranean, and 
separated the fauna and the types of Man 
inhabiting temperate Europe and Asia from 
those which were fast becoming peculiar to 
Tropical Africa. 

The great mass of the Negro sub-species 
was locked up in the African Continent south 



PREHISTORIC TIMES 25 

of the Desert Belt, and thus prevented from 
fusing with the Caucasian races of Europe, 
North Africa and Western Asia. The Negroes 
of Tropical Africa specialized in their isolation 
and stagnated in utter savagery. They may 
even have been drifting away from the human 
standard back towards the brute when mi- 
gratory impulses drew the Caucasian, the 
world's redeemer, to enter Tropical Africa by 
four main routes, mingle his blood with that 
of the pristine negroes, and raise the mental 
status of these dark-skinned, woolly-haired, 
prognathous, retrograded men by the intro- 
duction of Neolithic arts and ideas of religion, 
domestic animals, cultivated plants, superior 
weapons, and devices with which to combat 
successfully reactionary Nature or fierce wild 
beasts. 

But fifty, thirty, ten thousand years ago 
the difference in mammalian fauna and 
human races between North Africa and Egypt 
on the one hand, and Tropical Africa on the 
other, was not as great as it is to-day. People 
of Negro stock (together, it may be, with 
Australoids and early types of Caucasians) 
inhabited the southern shores of the Mediter- 
ranean and Lower as well as Upper Egypt. 
In Egypt, down to about five thousand 
years ago, there were African elephants. But 
for the intervention of man, the hippopotamus, 
extinct for many thousand years in Southern 
Europe and Western Asia, would now be 
sporting in the Delta of the Nile (the last was 



26 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

killed in the Nile Delta about 1658 a.d.), and 
swimming out, perhaps, into the salt water 
of the Mediterranean, as it swims into the 
Indian Ocean from the mouth of the Zambezi. 
The lion would range throughout the length 
and breadth of Egypt, feeding on wild bulls 
(? Bos CEgyptiacus), addaxes, oryxes, harte- 
beests, ibexes, gazelles, wild asses; and 
leopards, chitas, perhaps buffaloes and even 
giraffes would abound, just as they did in 
the not-very-far-removed times of the first 
dynasties of Egyptian kings — say five thousand 
years ago and more. 

Even Mauretania, much more separated 

feographically from True Africa than Lower 
igypt, possessed a far richer mammalian 
fauna five thousand to fifty thousand years 
ago than it does at the present day — huge 
buffaloes, whose enormous curved horns were 
fourteen or fifteen feet long ; nilghais larger 
than those of India ; hippopotami, wild 
asses, zebras, gnus, elands, pallas, long- 
necked gazelles, wild bulls Mke the aurochs 
of Europe, and bears and deer that are now 
extinct, elephants which died out during 
the Roman Empire or at the coming of the 
Arabs, lions of which the last were killed 
less than thirty years ago, and leopards and 
hyenas which still remain. 

And to hunt successfully this wonderful 
fauna, of which I have only mentioned a few 
examples, the white man had come to North 
Africa twenty-five thousand, fifteen thousand, 



PREHISTORIC TIMES 27 

ten thousand years ago with his superior 
weapons, and, at a later date, his passion for 
building by placing one stone on another, his 
cleverness in carving commodious dwellings in 
the soft limestone rock, his cunning with nets 
and snares, and his new-found interest in 
agriculture and the taming of wild animals 
that he might utilize them for milk, for flesh, 
for their furry or woolly coats, as beasts of 
burden or of transport, or as emblems in which 
he might typify great forces and principles 
necessary to his dawning ideas of religion. 

This survey of the ancient history of Africa 
within the human period brings us down to a 
time removed from our own by some twenty 
thousand years, when the white man, first, 
it may be, of the Fula, and then of Hamitic 
and Libyan types, was preparing to invade 
Negro Africa by four principal routes. One of 
these, no doubt, was along the Atlantic coast, 
from Morocco to the Senegal river and thence 
to the Niger, through a region less arid, less 
deficient in water supply twenty to fifteen 
thousand years ago than it is at the present 
day. [And even now this land route is chiefly 
difficult, not from natural obstacles, but because 
of the JDitter hostility towards the European 
on the part of the degenerate Moors and Arabs 
who occupy the Atlantic coast-lands of the 
Sahara at the present day.] The second 
main line of migration which the white man 
of Libyan or Fula type followed in attempt- 
ing to penetrate the lands of the negroes 



28 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

lay along the plateaus and mountain ranges 
between southern Tunis and the basin of Lake 
Chad. From a very remote period in the 
earth's history there has always been a sort of 
mountain skeleton for Northern Africa, a 
region of Palaeozoic rocks, which has not been 
submerged since the Primary epoch, and which 
has always constituted a land bridge connect- 
ing all parts of North Africa with West, 
Central, East, and South Africa — True Africa. 
[True Africa once formed a single continent 
with Brazil, Madagascar and Southern India.] 
Such a permanent land bridge at the present 
day is represented by the long range of the 
Atlas Mountains and the plateaus of the north- 
western part of the Sahara : by the table-lands 
of Tademait, Tasili, Ahaggar ; and the 
Tummo, Tibesti, Ennedi, and Murrah Moun- 
tains. This elevated region connects the 
fertile, well-watered lands of Mauretania and 
Tripoli with those of the Egyptian and Nigerian 
Sudan. The direction of this bridge is from 
north-west to south-east; and therefore for 
this reason, in types of fauna, flora and 
human races, Mauretania, on the far north- 
west, is perhaps more nearly connected with 
East-central than with West Africa. It is 
important to bear this bridge of rocks and 
mountains in mind, because effectual as the 
Sahara Desert has been as a recent barrier 
between Europe and True Africa, there has, 
nevertheless, been constant communication 
between the two regions by way of the moun- 



PREHISTORIC TIMES 29 

tain ridges athwart the Sahara Desert. The 
choking sands of the Libyan and Saharan 
deserts scarcely exist on these high table- 
lands and mountains between the southern 
Atlas and Darfur. Tremendous desiccation 
has taken place, no doubt, south of the Atlas 
and north of the tropical rains. Once luxu- 
riant forests have disappeared, leaving at most 
a few traces on the highest mountains of Ahag- 
gar and Tibesti ; but in the most elevated 
regions snow lies occasionally and sufficient 
rain falls in the winter season (or farther 
south in the height of the summer) to maintain 
springs and brooks, and here and there a 
shrubby vegetation or a few trees. These 
conditions render it possible for wild beasts 
and birds to exist, and human beings to main- 
tain themselves with their flocks and herds 
and a limited amount of agriculture. 
■ A third way of access from the Mediterra- 
nean to Tropical Africa lay up the valley of the 
Nile. This was the easiest way of all, leading 
as it did to Abyssinia and Galaland on the 
south-east ; Kordofan, Darfur, Wadai, the 
Shari basin, and Lake Chad on the south-west. 
But due south towards the Mountains of the 
Moon and the Central Lakes region (then 
certainly an area of almost impenetrable 
forest inhabited by gorillas, chimpanzees, 
okapis and elephants) the advance of the 
white man and even of the negro was greatly 
obstructed by the vegetation-choked swamps 
of the Upper Nile, the remains of a former 



80 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

huge, shallow lake which covered much of the 
basin of the Bahr-al-Ghazal and White Nile. 

The fourth and last route to Negroland in 
ancient times was from Arabia across to 
Abyssinia or Somaliland, and thence up the 
ancient Rift valley which lay to the north and 
west of the Somaliland and Gala deserts 
and approached well-watered, not too thickly 
forested East Africa by way of Lakes Rudolf 
and Baringo, and the snow-crowned volcanoes 
of Kenya and Kilimanjaro, with a divergent 
line of march to Mount Elgon. 

These were the principal, if not the only, 
routes trodden by the earliest Caucasian ad- 
venturers, the pioneers in the task of " open- 
ing up " Africa. Long afterwards, beginning 
perhaps two thousand years before Christ, 
attempts were to be made by the white 
man and the Polynesian to reach the coasts of 
Tropical Africa from across the sea : Egyptian 
sailors would steer their lateen-sailed vessels 
down the Red Sea to Somaliland. The 
Carthaginians and Phoenicians on the north- 
west and the Himyarite and Sabsean Arabs 
on the north-east carried out voyages (we 
are entitled to assume, though very few are 
recorded historically) which made the first- 
named acquainted with the west coast of 
Africa as far as Sierra Leone, and the latter 
with the east coast down to the Zambezi, 
the Comoro Islands, and the north end of 
Madagaskar. But the most wonderful of 
these early attempts to open up Africa by sea 



PREHISTORIC TIMES 31 

was the invasion of Madagaskar by peoples 
of the Malay Archipelago, the ancestors of 
all or nearly all the existing tribes of that large 
island. When this took place — began and 
finished — we cannot tell with any precision. 
But it is a question which will be discussed in 
greater detail in Chapter III. 

From the basin of the Nile, and the eastern 
Horn of Africa, the Negro spread over Tropical 
and South Africa in three principal types : (1) 
short-legged, prognathous, long-headed, hairy, 
splay-toed, and dark-skinned — as illustrated 
by the Forest Negro of West, Central, and 
South Africa, some of the Congo pygmies, and 
perhaps the modern Vaalpens and vanished 
Strandloopers of South Africa; (2) the tall, 
long-legged, black-skinned Nilotic Negroes; 
and (3) the short- statured, rounder-headed, 
yellow-skinned Bushman, with tightly curled, 
less abundant head-hair and an almost hair- 
less body. There has also been an element 
— perhaps very ancient — in the heart of Africa 
which might almost be called Negrito or " Asia- 
tic Negro," and which perhaps explains the 
rounder heads in some parts of the Congo and 
Bahr-al-Ghazal basins and may have played 
some part in the origination of the Bushman. 

All these types mingled freely with one 
another (even at the present day the six-feet- 
two-inches-tall Sudanese soldiers will take as 
their wives pygmy women from the North-east 
Congo basin of barely four feet eight inches 
in height, and have normal-sized children by 



32 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

them) : and in time produced the many races, 
peoples and tribes which inhabit Negro Africa 
at the present day. It is doubtful, however, 
whether Negro Africa, outside the border 
regions of the Sahara, Northern Niger, Nubia, 
Abyssinia and Somaliland, has been very 
anciently inhabited by man. Not nearly so 
anciently as England, for example, where there 
were men not differing very greatly from the 
modern type living at the mouth of the Thames 
one hundred and thirty-five thousand years 
ago (this age is deduced by Professor Arthur 
Keith for the Galley Hill skull); or as Central 
Europe, wherein the age of man stretches back 
perhaps to five hundred thousand years; or 
Asia, where the record may go back much 
farther still. 

Fifty thousand years ago may be postulated 
as about the period at which the great Negro 
dispersal over Tropical Africa began. One of 
the obstacles to a rapid human conquest of this 
continent was the dense forest which at that 
time covered so much of Tropical Africa 
between the southern limits of the Sahara and 
the valley of the Zambezi. 

Until the Caucasian began to influence the 
Negro, the latter was (and is now in a few 
parts of Africa) only in the Palseolithic stage of 
culture — that is to say, the state of industrial 
development in which stones merely broken or 
flaked (or drilled with holes) or in their natural 
condition are used as implements, together 
with stakes or sticks split or pointed by 



PREHISTORIC TIMES 33 

burning, horns and teeth of mammals, beaks 
of birds, shells and thorns, are regarded as 
sufficient aids to man in his hunting and 
fishing, his intertribal wars, his search for 
roots and medicines, and his very elementary 
needs of house-building. The early negroes 
were acquainted with the use of fire, partly 
from the frequent bush fires resulting from 
lightning flashes : but they may not have 
acquired till their contact with the Caucasian 
the art of making fire artificially. They prac- 
tised no agriculture, kept no domestic animals, 
except (it may be) dogs of South Asiatic origin. 
Both sexes went naked, so far as any sense of 
shame prevailed ; but they adorned their skins 
by raising patterns on them of weals and scars- 
(cicatrization), they stuck porcupine quills 
through the nose or lip, they wore necklaces 
and waist-belts of teeth, knuckle-bones, shells, 
seeds, or plaited grass, and adorned their 
mops of head hair with the plumes of birds. 

In the forest regions of dense tropical rains 
they made for themselves shelters or huts by 
sticking long twigs or pliant boughs into the 
ground and bending them over so that their 
tips again entered the soil, describing an arch. 
On to these sticks they heaped or fastened by 
their stalks quantities of leaves. In the more 
open, park-Kke country the shelters and night- 
dwellings were thatched with grass, and en- 
compassed with branches of thorns to keep 
off wild beasts. In the rocky or sterile country 
early African man was a cave-dweller whenever 



34 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

and wherever he could find a rock shelter or 
cavern. 

The primitive Negro's chief care and subject 
of thought was how to fill his belly. This 
preoccupation overrode all others. But the 
next interest in life, in the case of a male, 
was to get and keep a mate, who hunted with 
him and for him, dug up roots, sought for 
medicines in trees and herbs, cooked the food, 
and produced children who in time became 
a source of strength to the community. Of 
religion the early Negro had very little, and — 
as compared to the European and Asiatic — 
was singularly little interested in the skies of 
night or day. He was no sun or moon worship- 
per (though of the two the moon interested him 
most as a measurer of time). Some of the 
planets and constellations he knew by name or 
may even have imagined stories about, though 
when these myths are encountered at the 
present day they always suggest foreign (^^ e. 
non-Negro influence. He — the primitive Negro 
— probably believed in a vague way that some 
form of spirit life continued after the death of 
the body, either by the spirit lingering in the 
vicinity of the grave in some shadow-like form 
or by its passing into the body of a wild beast, 
bird, or snake : especially such animals as fre- 
quented the vicinity of human settlements. 

But in the main he thought little of any- 
thing but killing and eating animals ; and 
obtaining honey from the hives of the wild 
bees, fruits from the trees, roots and fungi 



PREHISTORIC TIMES 35 

from the ground. He entered Africa from 
Asia (we may imagine) possessed of the boomer- 
ang or throwing stick, of the bow and stone- 
tipped arrow, the stone-headed lance, club, and 
stone-weighted digging stick. He understood 
how to lay snares and dig pitfalls, but in all 
respects he was in a state of Palaeolithic culture 
sunilar to that of Europe and Asia from thirty 
thousand to — let us say — two hundred thou- 
sand years ago : and to that of Black Australia 
in the nineteenth century. 

In all probability the speech of the ancient 
Negroes of Africa belonged to two different 
types : one with words or word-roots expressed 
in a single syllable and pronounced with 
clicks, gasps, harsh gutturals and nasals 
almost impossible of transcription; the other 
melodious, broad- vowelled, slightly nasal, with 
words running more often than not into two 
or more syllables. The Negro tongues of this 
second group resemble in phonology the 
Melanesian languages of Oceania and Malaysia ; 
the first-mentioned type — illustrated by the 
Bushman and one or two East African and 
Sudan languages — finds some slight parallel 
in certain of the Negrito and Micronesian 
languages of Malaysia and the Equatorial 
Pacific; and even an underlying kinship (in 
phonology) with certain Hamitic and proto- 
Semitic dialects of Ethiopia : due no doubt to 
an ancient permeation of these regions by a 
primitive Bushman-Negro population. 

These speculations as to the pre-history 

B 2 



36 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

of Africa, the period at which Caucasian inter- 
penetration commenced, the comparatively 
modern date at which the Negro in three 
or more varieties overran the southern and 
tropical two-thirds of the continent, are sug- 
gestions and not at present assertions capable 
of undisputed proof. But they rest on 
some evidence, negative as much as positive : 
stone implements, kitchen middens, skulls, 
rock-drawings. And the lapse of time is 
calculated by the rate at which water cuts 
down rocks, silts up lakes, and deposits 
alluvium. Such information as we have 
acquired about the unrecorded past of Africa, 
leads us to believe that though it can be 
proved by osseous remains, implements, and 
rock-drawings that the Caucasian or white- 
man type has inhabited Mauretania for at 
least twenty thousand years back (probably 
longer) ; and Egypt — the valley of the Lower 
Nile — for nearly the same period ; and Somali- 
land, Abyssinia, and perhaps the northern 
bend of the Niger for — ^let us say — about 
fifteen thousand years — yet that the true 
Caucasian sub-species came as a stranger to 
Africa, and did not even originate in the 
Mediterranean coast -lands of that continent, 
but in Europe or Western Asia. 

It seems equally probable that the Negro 
originated in Southern Asia; and that he at a 
period by no means remote as human history 
is measured, travelled to Africa by a land 
route across Arabia. The Lemurian sub- 



PREHISTORIC TIMES 



37 



continent which undoubtedly once connected 
Tropical Africa and Madagaskar with India, 
could have played no part in facilitating this 
land journey, for if geological evidence is of 
any value it must have been covered by the 
sea before Man himself came into existence 
in the Pliocene period. But it is not incon- 
ceivable that as recently as fifty thousand 
years from now, Arabia and Africa may still 
have had some connecting isthmus across the 
Gulf of Aden, while the climate of Arabia 
may have been more humid, and vegetation 
more abundant. Where at present exist un- 
trodden, unmapped deserts of shifting sands, 
lakes of fresh water and inlets of the sea may 
have made of this stern land a genial home 
for man and beast, a half-way house between 
Asia and Africa. 

. But, above all, one^act seems clear to the 
author of this book j that though the Negro 
preceded the Caucasfen in the opening up of 
Africa- — of the forested Africa whichlies beyond 
Somaliland and the Sahara-^he did so at no 
very distant date (compared to the .jJeopling 
of Europe), and that he had in the remoter, 
southern part of this dark jebntinent no 
human predecessor. 




'JX^ 







J^vJiM^- 



38 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 
CHAPTER II 

THE WORK OF EGYPT 

The Libyan or Berber — ^quite a white man ^ 
as compared with the Hamite and the 
Egyptian — has been for about twelve thousand 
years the dominant and underlying inhabitant 
of Northern Africa. He absorbed or expelled 
the pre-existing whites of the Fula stock, the 
remaining Negroids or Neanderthaloids in 
Mauretania and Lower Egypt; he penetrated 
south-eastward to the Abyssinian mountains 
and even to Somaliland; he may at an early 
date in his history have crossed the Sahara 
and reached the Senegal and the Northern 
Niger; being checked here and elsewhere on 
the threshold of real Africa by the micro- 
organisms of disease swarming in the blood 
of the African negro and conveyed thence by 
the mosquito or the tsetse fly. 

In Mauretania and Lower Egypt, perhaps 

* It has been pointed out by Professor Petrie_, that in 
Ancient Egypt the direct hybrid between the Libyan and 
the Negro was a mulatto with all the characteristics of 
the modern hybrid between the European and the Negro : 
whereas the mingling of the Egyptian or Semite^ Hamite 
or Fula with the black man produces a handsomer^ more 
physically perfect human being. Some of the existing 
pure-blood Berber tribes of North Africa at the present 
day are white-skinned^ and have the faces of Europeans ; 
yet many are dark-complexioned and more Afaican in 
appearance. This is due to the persistence in that region 
of an early Negro strain, and to the constant importation 
of Negro slaves for the past eight hundred years. 



THE WORK OF EGYPT 39 

also Abyssinia, he began to pass out of the 
Palaeolithic stage of culture about ten thou- 
sand years ago : possibly because of the in- 
fluence , reacting on him from Syria. Syria 
(together . with Mesopotamia and Arabia) 
derived the light of Neolithic knowledge from 
Asia Minor ; a region which may prove to have 
been, with Pontus and the Danube valley, 
the birthplace of human civilization and of 
several great families of human speech. 

The Libyans were probably preceded (as 
Caucasians) in their occupation of North-east 
Africa (especially the Red Sea coast and 
Abyssinia) by the Hamites, an earlier and 
more negroid branch of the Arabian races 
which spoke sex-denoting languages. Possibly 
the Hamites had been the pioneers of this 
tripartite group, of which at one time the 
Semites were the northern and the Libyans 
•the western section. The Hamites, repre- 
sented at the present day by the Gala, Somali, 
Danakil, and the Beja-Bisharin tribes of the 
western Red Sea littoral and the Nubian 
Desert, had no doubt first populated southern 
and western Arabia and had then crossed 
over and occupied the mountain regions west 
of the Red Sea, mixing their blood freely 
with the Bushmen, Negroes, and Fula-like 
Caucasians who had preceded them. They 
had at most attained to the pastoral stage 
with cattle, but in the main were hunters 
and not so civilized as the whiter Libyans. 

The Semites, it is thought — as early as 



40 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

nine thousand years before Christ — crossed 
the Red Sea (on which even in that remote 
period there were small ships or biggish 
boats) and established themselves in the 
Nubian Alps, while they were taking the 
places of the Libyans in Sinai and Midian. 
Far to the south they were extending over 
Arabia and perhaps pushing before them a 
remarkable people, who are styled by ethno- 
logists the " dynastic " Egyptians, for the 
reason that they gave Egypt her ruling people 
and her caste of rulers for five thousand years. 
Judging from the examples depicted in the 
monuments of Egypt, and even from such 
types as are occasionally met with among 
the fellahin, or country-folk, at the present 
day, these dynastic Egyptians were of almost 
ideal human beauty, though the men were 
usually handsomer than the women. This 
ancient Egyptian type had a somewhat long 
head with an excellent development of brain, 
well-formed features, but fleshy rather than 
sharp-angled and lean like the Arab, some- 
what full lips, large and long eyes, and a 
stature in the men almost averaging five feet 
ten inches. The skin-colour was sallow or 
reddish-yellow, the hair was ordinarily black, 
but of fine texture, and almost entirely free 
from any negro kink. Occasionally it was 
brown, but this no doubt was due to the 
Libyan or European element in the race. In 
the earliest days of their immigration they 
were relatively heedless about clothing so far 



THE WORK OF EGYPT 41 

as matters of decency were concerned, but 
after the primitive times, the costumes of the 
men became somewhat elaborate. 

The language they spoke by the time they 
had taken possession of Egypt was a member 
of the great but loosely- joined group which 
includes the Hamitic, Libyan and Semitic 
tongues, yet in many ways it differed mark- 
edly from these other languages of Arabia, 
Palestine and North Africa. It was almost 
without syntax and its roots were mostly 
monosyllabic, a few extending to two syllables. 
It wa3 without the three-syllabled roots 
which are so characteristic of the Semitic 
and are not strange to Hamitic and Libyan. 
Ancient Egyptian in some respects suggests 
a remote kinship with the rather monosyllabic 
speech of the Nilotic negroes. But it was 
more obviously sex-denoting than are these, 
and among numerous points of relationship 
to the Semitic and Libyo-Hamitic groups 
was the use of the consonant " t " as a femi- 
nine letter, specially employed to indicate the 
feminine gender of words, either as suffix or 
prefix. 

The original home or centre of development 
of this " dynastic " Egyptian type seems to 
have been in southern or south-western 
Arabia, the land of Punt or Puanit (or Puoni) 
of Egyptian traditions. The region of Yaman 
and of the Hadhramaut — south-western and 
southern Arabia — ^ten to fifteen thousand 
years ago was probably an even better- 



42 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

favoured region of Arabia than it is at the 
present day, when it still bears the Roman 
designation of Arabia Felix — so much of the 
rest of this gaunt, lava-covered, sand-strewn 
peninsula being decidedly " infehx." This 
portion of Tropical Arabia has high mountains, 
a certain degree of rainfall on them, and was 
anciently clothed in rich forests before the 
camels, goats, and sheep of NeoHthic and 
Bronze-age man nibbled away much of this 
verdure. Above all it grew trees oozing with 
delicious-scented resins or gums — frank- 
incense, principally Boswellia carteri (myrrh 
which was in almost equal demand from 
Arabia is the resin of Balsamodendron myrrha). 
These, when civilization dawned on the 
world redeemed by the white man, became 
very precious and an offering of sweet 
savour to the white man's gods, because so 
grateful to his own nostrils. For the gods 
have ever been man himself — the man oi the 
period — projected large upon the sky or the 
sea like a spectre of the Brocken. 

Here in this favoured region of Arabia (once, 
far back, the home of ancestral negroes) grew 
into definiteness what may be called the 
Egyptian type, which had probably already 
entered the Neolithic stage of culture with 
highly-finished stone weapons and implements 
of industry, and even employed copper for 
some purposes before it migrated from its 
home in Yaman or the Hadhramaut to colonize 
the valley of the Nile. 



THE WORK OF EGYPT 43 

Perhaps the ancestors of the dynastic 
Egyptians had already acquired in Arabia the 
art of building with stone, in the ever-increas- 
ing struggle with the growing drought which 
was so greatly to alter the human history of 
that sub-continent, and to compel men to 
construct dams of boulders to store up the 
water of mountain torrents, and to put stones 
together in fitted masonry in order that 
reservoirs of water might ensure the irrigation 
of their crops and pasture for their herds. 
Titanic works some of these were, and their 
bursting or crumbling in less careful times led 
— ^with other causes — to the steady depopula- 
tion of Southern Arabia and a relapse into 
semi-barbarism of the land which had been 
the mother of the civilization of Egypt, of 
Abyssinia, of East Africa, Madagaskar, Meso- 
potamia, and Phoenicia. However that may 
be, it is as builders above all that we first 
realize the presence of the dynastic Egyptian 
race in the valley of the Nile. 

Quite possibly, the impulse to seek another 
home across the Red Sea came from the ad- 
vance southwards of the earlier Semites, who 
may have been better armed than the future 
conquerors of Egypt. Some authorities have 
thought that the " land of Punt " lay in 
Somaliland, where frankincense and myrrh 
trees also grow; but it is more probable that 
Punt was South-western Arabia, and that the 
ancestors of the Egyptians landed north of the 
Suakin coast and marched inland till they 



44 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

reached the Nile valley in Nubia, gradually 
moving downstream till they concentrated 
themselves in the district between Thebes and 
Abydos. About eight thousand years ago 
they moved northwards on the old Libyan and 
Semitic capitals of Memphis and Heliopolis 
(to quote the Greek version of their names); 
and eventually conquered the whole of Egypt 
down to the Mediterranean shores and south- 
wards up to the First Cataract of the Nile, a 
region then inhabited by a mixture of Negroes 
and Hamites. 

North of the Koptos bend of the Nile the 
population was more Libyan and Semitic in 
its physical types, languages and religion. 
And scattered amongst these North African 
and Syro- Arabian races there were, no doubt, 
precursors of the true European — Minoans 
from Crete and the Mykenoean or Pelasgians 
of the islands and penisulas of the ^gean Sea 
already blossoming out into the most splendid 
civilization of the Neolithic period. Such 
hardy seamen- traders (precursors of the Philis- 
tines) brought to Egypt ideas about building, 
about domestic animals, weapons, writing, 
pottery and religion, which the dynastic 
Egyptians — for all they reigned in proud 
isolation above the divided Nile — were not 
slow to take hold of. For something like 
five thousand years the Egyptians seldom 
ceased warring against either the dispossessed 
Libyans or the intrusive Semites, of whom 
the Israelites were only one among thirty or 



THE WORK OF EGYPT 45 

forty similar tribes, who continually made 
their way across the Isthmus of Suez — now 
dry land and salt lakes — from Sinai, Midian, 
and Palestine : countries not nearly so attrac- 
tive to humanity as the perpetually irrigated, 
always fertile, lands of Lower Egypt. In one 
period of Egyptian history, for some nearly 
two hundred years, between about 1700 b.c, 
and 1580, all Lower and part of Upper Egypt 
was under the domination of a horde of 
Semites, known as the Shepherd Kings or 
Hak-su (a word which the Greek historians 
changed into Hyksos). According to Profes- 
sor Petrie this word is really Hikushasu or 
" Princes of the Beduin Arabs." Haq, Hik 
or Huk was a root in ancient Egyptian 
meaning "prince" — and also shepherd's crook, 
a symbol of princely rank. It is remarkable 
that a crook-shaped staff or long stick should 
so often be the symbol of chiefdom in Negro- 
Africa, and that another mark of noble birth 
in ancient Egypt — the whip — should figure 
in that sense to-day among the Fula and 
Mandingo of West Africa. 

Remembrance of their former power and 
civilization, however, never left the Egyptian 
people, who at length rose in Upper Egypt 
against their ignorant oppressors — an early 
type of Arab — and drove them back to the 
land of Midian. After the renascence of 
Egyptian power in 1580 B.C. the Pharaohs and 
their people, aided by Sardinian, Cretan and 
Libyan mercenaries, and Negro troops enlisted 



46 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

in Upper Nubia and the Sudan, frequently 
conquered and garrisoned Syria and Palestine, 
and carried the Egyptian standards to the 
mountains of Asia Minor and the banks of the 
Euphrates. But at length the dynasties of 
the Egyptian Pharaohs fell before the foreigner. 
Assyria, the Semitic conqueror of Babylon and 
Mesopotamia, conquered Egypt, or at any rate 
Lower Egypt, and Pharaohdom was only con- 
tinued in Upper Egypt by a dynasty of negroid 
— Ethiopian or Nubian — kings. A brief revival 
of ancient Egyptian rule — the Sa'ite Pharaohs 
of the XXVIth dynasty — was followed by 
the two crushing invasions of Persia (525- 
415 B.C. and 342-332 B.C.). This was succeeded 
by the domination of Greece after 332 B.C. 

Thenceforth, for nearly two thousand five 
hundred years, Egypt was not to experience 
the rule of a really native dynasty : she was 
always to be governed by kings, princes, 
emperors, tyrants, military adventurers, or 
successful soldiers (and their descendants) of 
foreign birth or extraction : Persians, Greeks, 
Romans, Arabs, Kurds, Turks, Syrians, Cir- 
cassians, Albanians, French generals, and 
Macedonian Turks. 

The Egyptian wars of conquest which 
began after the expulsion of the Hyksos, 
and extended over Syria and Cyprus, and 
the succeeding Asiatic and European con- 
quests of Egypt, played a notable part in 
the opening up of Africa. The intercourse 
resulting. from these struggles brought many 



THE WORK OF EGYPT 47 

European and Asiatic inventions and pro- 
ducts into Egypt. Especially was this the 
case as regards domestic animals and plants. 

The Negro in his untouched state, as has 
been remarked, was without any domestic 
animals except the dog, and even that may 
have been absent from his earliest immigration 
into Africa; and he had cultivated no plant 
of African origin, unless the yam (Dioscorea) 
and the Pennisetum, Panicum and Paspalum 
millets are an exception. There are certain 
kinds of bean, such as those of the genera 
Crotalaria, Tephrosia, Phaseolus and Dolichos, 
which have been semi-cultivated by the 
Bantu and Sudanese negroes, at any rate, 
during the last thousand years or so. The 
Arachis ground-nut (an earth-pea) is said by 
some to have originated in Tropical America, 
and to have been thence introduced into 
West Africa by the Portuguese, while the 
similarly growing Voandzeia (earth-pea) came 
from Madagaskar. Both of these leguminous 
earth-peas ('* monkey-nuts ") are now spread 
all over Negro Africa except the south- 
west extremity. The date-palm was indi- 
genous to the Sahara Desert, Egypt and 
Arabia, and grew most luxuriantly on the 
northern fringe of the desert regions, wherever 
there was any oasis or underground stream of 
water. Another species of wild date grows 
over nearly all Tropical Africa, but although 
its fruits, when fully ripe, are quite eatable, 
no attempt has ever been made by the negro 



48 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

to cultivate it, though he has taken some 
trouble with the more important oil palm, 
and with the Borassus and Hyphsene palms. 
Negroes drink the sweet sap of all these 
palms and they eat the nuts if they are 
eatable. 

The Egyptians when they invaded the val- 
ley of the Nile found the pre-existing Libyans, 
Proto-Semites and Hamites already cultivat- 
ing wheat, barley, and perhaps millet (Pani- 
cum). But it is doubtful whether they already 
had the Durra grain (Sorghum or Andropogon). 
This corn, probably known in Egyptian records 
as Boti, the source of their bread-making 
flour, was perhaps introduced into Egypt from 
Arabia after the commencement of the dynas- 
tic period, and rapidly became the commonest 
form of grain all over Negro Africa, except in 
the densely-forested regions of the west or the 
Bushman country in the south. The culti- 
vated forms of Pennisetum millet and the 
Eleusine coracana came to ancient Egypt from 
Syria : rice and the sugar-cane were unknown 
to the ancient Egyptians, but they had ob- 
tained or brought from Asia or Eastern Europe 
lentils, peas and beans of the genera Lens, 
Ervum, Pisum, Cicer, Vicia and Dolichos, 
besides clover and vetches for forage. They 
cultivated in later times an Indian type of 
" water-lily," Nelumbium speciosum, which 
produced a bean-like fruit good for food. 
They grew in their gardens gourds, pumpkins, 
melons and water-melons ; onions, radishes 



THE WORK OF EGYPT 49 

and lettuces : all these things coming to them 
from Syria. Their grape vine ( Vitis vinifera) 
probably came also from Asia : it is not indi- 
genous to Egypt or Tropical Africa. The 
olive-tree grows wild in Abyssinia and North 
Africa, as well as in Western Asia, but it was 
seemingly not cultivated by the ancient 
Egyptians, who obtained their supplies of 
olive oil from Palestine, Syria and Greece. 
They themselves extracted oil from the castor- 
oil plant, from flax (linseed), possibly from 
rape seed {Brassica campestris), from lettuce 
seed, and from sesamum : all of which culti- 
vated plants were of Asiatic origin. For 
fruit they had the indigenous date, pome- 
granates, grapes, figs (the Asiatic or Mediter- 
ranean type, and the African Sycomore fig), 
the wild fruit of the jujube bushes (Zizyphus), 
melons, and perhaps water-melons. 

Of all these cultivated trees and plants, 
almost entirely of West Asian origin [a con- 
stant reminder, in common with the domestic 
animals, that Neolithic civilization arose in 
Asia near the confines of Europe], the ancient 
Egyptians passed on to Negro Africa only 
the following list of food-products : wheat (in 
a limited degree only); Eleusine, Pennisetum 
and Sorghum, now spread nearly all over 
Negro Africa; Panicum millet (North-east and 
East Africa and perhaps parts of northern 
Nigeria); peas and beans (but not lentils or 
vetches); pumpkins and gourds, but not 
melons or water-melons. 



50 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

In Abyssinia in ancient times a species of 
Poa grass was cultivated for its grain. In 
the swampy parts of the Congo basin, the 
Upper Zambezi, and perhaps other regions of 
Equatorial Africa, there is a kind of wild rice 
{Zizania ?) the grain of which is used for food 
by the negroes. In West Africa there were 
also the tubers of the yam (Bioscorea) and the 
Taro yam, apparently known to the ancient 
Egyptians as Kulkas (latinized into Colocasia). 
The first named, which is related to our hedge 
bryony, would seem to have originated as a 
cultivated form (there are several wild species) 
in Tropical Asia, but it might conceivably be 
derived from a wild African Bioscorea; the 
latter, the Taro, is an Aroid, and seems like 
the banana to have been first cultivated 
in South-eastern Asia and to have reached 
Tropical Africa from the East. 

The dynastic Egyptians, being a people in 
the NeoMthic stage when they mastered the 
Lower Nile valley, were prone to tame and 
domesticate animals. To some extent, no 
doubt, the Libyans had preceded them in 
this; and it may be that they found the wild 
bull of North-east Africa — Bos cegyptiacus — 
already brought into captivity. This animal 
may be identical with the species described 
as Bos indicus, which is found fossil in the 
alluvial formations of Algeria. It is closely 
related to the zebu or humped cattle (Bos 
indicus) of India and of East Africa. In the 
west of Mauretania there are remains of an 



THE WORK OF EGYPT 51 

extinct ox, Bos opisthonomus, which come 
very near to the Aurochs {Bos primigenius), 
an anima] which was the father or the grand- 
father of so many of the breeds of European 
and North-east Asian cattle. Bos opisihono- 
mus or primigenius may have penetrated 
into Northern Syria, but the " wild bulls " 
hunted in Egypt, Southern Mesopotamia and 
Syria (the " Bulls of Bashan ") seem to have 
had the characteristics of Bos cegyptiacus. 
This form agrees with the zebu, or Indian 
humped ox, in many points — set and direc- 
tion of horns, dewlap, markings and voice, 
but differs from it in having a perfectly 
straight back. The humped ox was perhaps 
first domesticated in India and was intro- 
duced thence at a not very remote date into 
Southern Arabia, North-east, North-central, 
East, and South-east Africa, and Madagaskar, 
no doubt by the Arabs, Islamic and pre- 
Islamic. In parts of East Africa and Nigeria 
at the present day it has been so much mixed 
in blood with the long-horned Bos cegyptia- 
cus that it shares with the latter the feature 
of enormous upright horns. 

In early Egypt Bos cegyptiacus had already 
developed very long, upward-and-backward- 
directed horns. When this breed passed on 
to Galaland, and still more when it reached 
the mountain region of Equatorial Africa and 
the country round Lake Chad, its horns grew 
to an enormous size, larger than those of 
any ox except the extinct buffaloes of North 



52 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

and South Africa. But where it penetrated 
westward towards the Atlantic coast in Congo- 
land and Senegambia the form of the body 
became smaller and more compact and the 
horns dwindled. The early Bantu invaders 
of South-west Africa (Damaraland) and the 
Hottentots brought with them a form of this 
Egyptian ox to the regions south-west of the 
Upper Zambezi. 

When the dynastic Egyptians first settled 
in the valley of the Nile they had these long- 
horned oxen, dogs of the pariah, greyhound, 
and perhaps hound breeds; and they tamed 
the wild sheep of the desert — Ovis lervia, the 
Addax and Oryx antelopes, the Nubian ibex 
(at one time very common), gazelles, cranes, 
ducks, geese and pigeons (the Rock-dove). 
In somewhat later times the wild Egyptian 
cat {Felis ocreata) was domesticated — ^no doubt 
for rat-killing as well as for fishing and hunt- 
ing — and certainly formed the foundation of 
the domestic breeds of cat in Europe and 
Western Asia. The African elephant was 
apparently not brought under control. Indian 
elephants were frequently imported from Syria 
(where they seem to have existed wild, down 
to about 1000 B.C., and long before that date 
to have been tamed by Hittites, Syrians or 
Persians) ; the hippopotamus was reverenced, 
yet also hunted for food, but was not tamed; 
and pigs were probably not derived from the 
then indigenous wild boar, but were obtained 
from Asia. Although the domestic pig figures a 



THE WORK OF EGYPT 53 

good deal in the early monuments of Egyptian 
art, it soon fell into disfavour as an unhealthy, 
evil-smelling, unclean beast. 

Soon after history begins the Egyptians 
are obviously discarding the semi-domesti- 
cated desert sheep, ibexes, oryxes and gazelles 
in favour of the domestic goats and sheep 
which are being brought in from Syria and 
Arabia. These were of successive types. 
First came hairy sheep with short horns, 
long legs, and a simple, long tail, which 
passed on westwards into Negro Africa and 
developed into the Maned sheep we see to-day 
throughout West Africa and the Congo basin. 
Then came (from southern Arabia or Syria) 
the fat-tailed sheep with short horns or horn- 
less. This found its way southward into 
Galaland, Abyssinia, Somaliland and Equa- 
torial East Africa, A breed of it was carried 
by the Hottentots into South-west Africa. In 
East and South-central Africa the maned and 
fat-tailed breeds of hairy sheep mingled into 
a composite form. Next came into Egypt 
from the East a breed of large sheep with 
long hair and spiral horns growing out at 
right angles horizontally from the forehead. 
This breed travelled across the Sudan west- 
ward to Nigeria and also reached Abyssinia, 
but was otherwise foreign to Negro Africa. 

About 2000 B.C. all these hairy breeds were 
superseded in Northern Africa by the intro- 
duction of woolly sheep from Syria and 
perhaps from Eastern Europe. Woolly sheep, 



54 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

though they extend throughout North Africa 
to Morocco and the oases of the Sahara, 
never penetrated into Negroland, except that 
they have reached the Niger iDasin in the 
vicinity of Timbuktu. The sheep of the 
Tuareg are nearly always degenerate woolly 
sheep. 

The first kind of goat kept in Upper Egypt 
(coming perhaps from southern Arabia) was 
probably the small Guinea breed, a plump, 
little, short-legged goat, with close-cropped 
hair and short horns. This has been almost 
exclusively the breed of Negro Africa. Its 
range may never have reached Lower Egypt, 
only Abyssinia and Somaliland. The small 
" Guinea " breed of goat probably originated 
in India and has reached as far east as Borneo. 
To Lower Egypt and North Africa there came 
the Syrian breed hornless or with short horns, 
long neck, arched nose, long legs, long hair 
and drooping ears. This type has reached 
Abyssinia and central Nigeria. It is also 
found in India. 

The wild ass of Nubia and the Libyan Desert 
was very early brought into domestication by 
the Egyptians or their Hamitic predecessors. 
But it never really reached true Negroland 
as a domestic animal, though it penetrated to 
Eastern Equatorial Africa with sections of 
the Nilotic negroes, and to the northern parts 
of the Niger basin, as well as throughout 
North Africa and the Sahara. The Egyptians, 
strange to say, seem to have had no know- 



THE WORK OF EGYPT 55 

ledge of the zebra, though they were in touch 
with Abyssinia and SomaHland, where this 
handsome equine was found in two forms. 
There is some slight indication that the Egyp- 
tians knew the camel (probably as a wild 
animal) in the early days of their colonization 
of the Lower Nile valley; but as a tamed 
beast of burden it only came among them in 
the Ptolemaic era. It was the Semites of 
Mesopotamia, apparently, who first tamed 
the one-humped camel, perhaps in this imi- 
tating the Aryans and iHittites of the north, 
who had already domesticated the two-humped 
Bactrian camel. No form of wild horse came 
nearer to ancient Egypt than Mauretania, and 
the Egyptians only knew the animal in its 
domesticated Syrian type quite late in their 
history, from about 1500 B.C. The horse then 
began to penetrate into Abyssinia and subse- 
quently Somaliland, but evidently did not reach 
the Sudan or any part of Negroland until after 
the invasion of Africa by the Muhammadan 
Arabs. Even then, until the nineteenth 
century, it rarely got beyond the basin of 
the Niger and Shari-Chad. 

The ostrich figures much in the prehistoric 
art of Egypt, and elaborate arrangements 
were made by the ancient Egyptians for hunt- 
ing and slaying it, so as to procure the coveted 
plumes; they even went so far as to start 
something like ostrich farms, and have left 
pictures on their monuments of men plucking 
the tame ostriches. But neither they nor 



56 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

any negro race seems to have thought of 
permanently domesticating this biggest of 
living birds, though such is a very easy opera- 
tion and can be performed by any one who 
will catch and tame young ostriches, or hatch 
out their eggs artificially : a process resorted 
to by the Egyptians in rearing broods of 
geese and ducks, and, much later on, domestic 
fowls. Also they kept guinea-fowl as curi- 
osities (and francolin and red-legged par- 
tridges), but did not develop them into 
permanently tamed additions to the poultry- 
yard. As to the domestic fowl, it only 
reached Egypt about 600 B.C. (at the earliest), 
and of course came from Persia via Syria. 
The Egyptians soon appKed to its rearing 
their invention of the incubator. 

Although they worshipped the Hawk as 
a type of certain divine energies, they never 
thought of making it of use to manldnd as 
a hunting bird. This idea only arose among 
the Caucasian peoples of Western and Central 
Asia. The Egyptians liked to have the 
Giraffe ^ as a curiosity, they made the Hippo- 
potamus — one of Nature's buffooneries — a 
goddess, the Crocodile a god, and the black 
and white Ibis a sacred emblem : but on the 
whole they are remarkable — ^given their high 

* It is curious that although they collected specimens 
of the giraiFe, panther, lion (which they often tamed), 
chita, baboon, monkey, and other animals from Tropical 
Africa, they quite ignored the rhinoceros, then common 
in Upper Nubia and the borders of Abyssinia. 



THE WORK OF EGYPT 57 

development of civilization — for what they 
left undone rather than for what they did 
in the matter of creating cultivated plants 
and trees and domestic breeds of mammals 
and birds. They abandoned their attempts 
to domesticate the ibex, the bubal and oryx 
antelopes, and the gazelles, they took no 
interest in the buffaloes of the Nile valley 
and Abyssinia (the Indian buffalo now so 
common in Egypt was only introduced about 
the tenth century of the Christian era from 
India) or the magnificent Kudu and Eland 
antelopes, they soon dropped their attempts 
to make the lovely Demoiselle crane an in- 
mate of their enclosures, nor do they seem 
to have permanently domesticated the white- 
fronted goose (Anser alhifrons), the sheldrake 
(Tadorna and Casarca), the chenalope or the 
mallard {Anas hoscas). The wild ox which 
has been named conjecturally Bos cegyptiacus 
may have first been tamed by the Libyans 
or the Syrians. In short, with all the 
wealth of the African fauna to draw on, 
the world at large apparently owes to the 
Neolithic civilization of Egypt only two of its 
permanently acquired domestic animals : the 
ass and the cat. 

To Negro Africa, Egypt and Abyssinia 
passed on the ox in two forms — straight- 
backed and long-horned (cegyptiacus) and 
humped [indicus). These gifts travelled due 
south up the Nile valley to the region of the 
Victoria Nyanza and the Zanzibar coast 



58 ; THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

(whence the humped ox reached Zululand 
and the Zambezi); and west-south-west to 
Lake Chad and the Niger. Goats and sheep 
of the earhest hairy kinds and a greyhound 
breed of hunting dog were other contribu- 
tions. The last-named only reached parts of 
Central and Western Africa, where it usually 
became nearly hairless and was often kept 
and bred for food, the eating of dog being a 
frequent practice in former times in Equa- 
torial and West Africa. This thin-haired 
greyhound hunting dog is often associated in 
legends and traditions with the arrival of 
semi -white wonder-working beings from the 
north. The other and older type of dog in 
Negro Africa was of the non-barking, smooth- 
haired, South Asiatic type; akin to the 
pariah dog of ancient Egypt, modern India 
and Western Asia, and the dingo-like forms 
of Malaysia and Australasia. Its introduc- 
tion into Negro Africa was probably a matter 
of many thousand years ago, though it is 
conceivable that the pristine negroes had no 
dog. But neither ancient Egypt, North- 
east Africa nor Negroland seems to have had 
any breed of dog of the bushy-haired, wolf 
or Chow type. Such dogs exist among the 
Berbers and Libyans of North Africa, from 
the oasis of Siwa on the east to the Rio de 
Oro on the west, and we know, from the 
familiar cave canem representations of the 
Roman statues and mosaics, that they were 
a common breed in Italy during the Roman 



THE WORK OF EGYPT 59 

Empire. Northwards, this type of Chow- 
like dog stretches over Northern Europe, 
Northern Asia and China to Arctic America. 
Southward it extends to the Sahara, but not 
to Egypt or Negroland or Southern Asia. 

In addition to cattle, goats, sheep, and a 
breed of dogs, Negro Africa received from 
ancient Egypt the domestic fowl, probably 
from about 800 B.C. onwards. There are, of 
course, some districts of the remoter forest 
regions of Equatorial Africa where the fowl 
has not > penetrated yet, and it was totally 
unknown to the Bushman and Hottentot. 

' The domestic pigeon is now met with in 
many parts of Negroland, but usually not 
far from " Muhammadan " Africa; and al- 
though it came mainly from Egypt, it was 
probably spread only after the Muhammadan 
Arabs and their allies permeated the Sudan 
and East Africa. The Arabs also (aided by 
the Europeans later) carried the domestic 
cat of an Egyptian or Indian type to many 
parts of Negro Africa. 

The only metal which interested the early 
Neolithic peoples was gold, as an ornament. 
When the Egyptians settled down in the Nile 
valley they began to hunt for gold, alluvial 
and in the rock; and found it in the Nubian 
Desert, between the Nile and the Red Sea, 
and also in Upper Nubia-Dongola. It may 
also have been discovered and worked through 
their instigation by Negro and Ethiopic tribes 
on the confines of Abyssinia and Darfur. 



60 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA- 

The rage for gold grew — has gone on growing 
ever since — about 8000 B.C. It is quite 
probable that the earliest examples of the 
Fula or Libyan white man that found their 
way anxiously across the western Sahara to 
the sweet waters of the Upper Senegal en- 
countered barbarous negroes or semi -Bush- 
men who could only converse with them in 
signs (" the silent trade "), but who had 
already picked up nodules and nuggets of 
the lovely metal in the river gravels and 
offered this glittering ornament to the skin- 
clad white men in exchange for salt from the 
desert, stone axes, beads of bluestone, or 
lambs or kids from their flocks. By the time 
Egypt was Hellenized or Romanized it is 
probable that the Carthaginians had, in an 
indirect manner and through the Libyans, 
opened up trading relations with the gold- 
yielding regions beyond the Niger basin — 
what we now call the Gold Coast; and both 
from Egypt, by way of Darfur and the Chad- 
Niger regions, and directly across the desert 
from Numidia, a trading intercourse was 
opened up with the basin of the Niger and 
beyond. It was in this way and about this 
time — say two thousand years ago — that an 
Egyptian style of architecture in brick and 
clay, Egyptian ideas of gold-, iron-, and copper- 
mining and working, of weaving, musical in- 
struments, boats or rafts made of planks or of 
reed-bundles, pottery, and the simpler methods 
of agriculture began to reach Nigerland, the 



THE WORK OF EGYPT 61 

Chad basin and northern Bantu Africa. But 
above all the Niger basin; for there sprung 
up on the Upper and Central Niger some two 
thousand years ago a faint far-off imitation 
of the life of the Nile valley, enhanced lat-er 
by a continuous stream of Caucasian and 
semi -Caucasian immigrants, and still more in 
recent times by the common possession with the 
Mediterranean East of the Muhammadan faith 
and Arab ideas of costume and adornment. 

But there were curious limitations in these 
gifts from the Libyan and the Egyptian to 
the Negro world. The latter received the 
iron or copper axe, which as in Egypt they 
came to regard as a symbol of divinity or 
semi-divinity; also the sword and dagger, 
even the adze, but never the saw nor any idea 
of sawing. The metal hoe came to them in 
place of the wooden branch-angle, and the 
wooden rake (besides the head-comb); but no 
plough. The plough penetrated from Egypt 
(which had it from Asia) to Morocco (though 
not to Spain) and to the uttermost limits of 
Galaland, but never entered Negro agri- 
culture till the nineteenth century. The 
wooden head-rest permeated Negroland from 
Egyptian models, and in West-central Africa 
(Ashanti to the Kamerun) became a monstrous 
stool; but no notion of carpentering or joinery 
penetrated Negro industries. Objects were 
hewn or carved from a solid block of wood : 
they were not pieced together, fitted, or 
united by nail and glue. 



62 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

Another great gap in the culture of the 
Negro was in regard to using stone for build- 
ing or for sculpture. It is true that in a few 
parts of West Africa the art of carving figures 
out of soft soapstone came into existence 
at some unknown period (Sierra Leone and 
Senegambia), and may have been inspired 
from the north; and in the Gambia country 
and the Cross River and Kamerun hinterland 
there are mysterious stone circles or single 
upright stones with some religious import; 
and both these exceptions to the usual negro 
disregard for stone seem to imply the ancient 
influence of Libya or Egypt percolating 
through the West African forest. Also, 
among the Nilotic negroes of the Upper Nile, 
and their kindred on the plateaus near Mount 
Elgon, stones are made use of for building 
rough graves, making rough walls, or even 
for setting up stone circles; but still more 
here we can trace these customs to the not 
far-off influence of the Hamite. But nine- 
tenths of the Negro race in the condition in 
which they were found by the modern Euro- 
pean absolutely ignored the use of stone for 
any purpose except the remote one of weight- 
ing their digging sticks or furnishing flakes 
for their arrow-blades or their axes, or lumps 
for hammers. Consequently the mystery of 
Zimbabwe and the other stone cities of 
South-east Africa (with their stone phalli, 
stone birds and monuments, and stone basins 
and crucibles) remains a profound puzzle to 



THE EARLY SEMITES 63 

the ethnologists in view of the present lack 
of evidence attaching them to their most 
obvious cause : the prehistoric, pre-Islamic 
wanderings across the Zambezi of Semites or 
Hamites. 

CHAPTER III 

THE EAHLY SEMITES 

The whole of Egypt, between the Mediter- 
ranean and the First Cataract of the Nile 
at Aswan, had become a white man's country- 
some seven thousand years ago. Between 
the First and Second Cataracts the banks of 
the Nile were inhabited by a dark-skinned 
population of mixed type, but mainly Hamitic 
with an infusion of Negro. These people 
were identical with the modern Bishari or 
Beja who have now been moved away to the 
east of the Nile valley. [Though friendly to 
the rule of the whiter Egyptians in the north, 
and ready to act as go-betweens in the trade 
intercourse of the Egyptians with the negro 
tribes farther south, they proved themselves 
very turbulent towards Roman and Byzantine 
rule and were consequently shifted to the 
Nubian Desert east of the Nile.] Their place 
along the Nile in Lower Nubia was in a measure 
taken by tribes of Nubian negroes who had 
invaded the oasis of Kharga west of Thebes 
(coming from Kordofan, the real Nubian 
country). By the orders of Diocletian these 



64 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

Nubian negroes were deported from Kharga 
to replace the rebellious " Blemmues " or 
Bisharin. 

The white man's country finished on the 
south of the Second Cataract (Wadi Haifa) 
when Egyptian rule reached its most splendid 
climax about three thousand two hundred 
years ago. And at this point Negroland began, 
just as to-day the " Sudan " (an Arab plural 
meaning " The black [people] ") begins — 
administratively — at Wadi Haifa. But since 
that period the unmixed negro race has 
retreated much farther south, to three or 
four hundred miles beyond the junction of 
the Blue and White Niles. Such black men 
as remained in Nubia, after the Roman 
Empire over Egypt came to an end, fused 
with the Hamites and above all with the 
Arab tribes who invaded the Nile valley at 
different times after 652 a.d., and mainly 
during the eleventh century. Nevertheless 
the Nubian negro tongue (which on the Nubian 
Nile displaced the Hamitic speech) still persists 
here and there, though Arabic is the dominating 
language. 

The Negro races dwelling on the Nile above 
the First and Second Cataracts were known 
as " Wawa " by the dynastic Egyptians. 
Whether they were of the same racial and 
language stock as the Nubian negroes who 
succeeded them we do not yet know. The 
word-root " Nuba " or " Nub " apparently 
comes from Kordof an. 



THE EARLY SEMITES 65 

As to the Hamitic peoples of ancient Egypt 
and the region between Egypt, the Red Sea 
and Abyssinia, they seem to have belonged to 
the most northern (Beja) branch of the Hamitic 
race, which, though it is regarded as still speak- 
ing an archaic type of Hamitic language, is 
perhaps a good deal mixed with negro blood 
from the remote date of their invasion of the 
Nile regions. They are and were more negroid 
than the dynastic Egyptians (the British 
soldier, and his literary interpreter Rudyard 
Kipling, aptly hit ofi their chief negroid 
characteristic when he called them "Fuzzy- 
wuzzies " from their bushy, kinky hair) ; and 
it is a remarkable fact that they should have 
remained so unchanged in mental development 
through all the seven thousand years which 
have elapsed since the first establishment of 
the splendid twin, kingdoms of the Pharaohs. 
The Beja were gross barbarians living along- 
side the amazing culture, art and knowledge 
of the dynastic Egyptians; they have barely 
ceased to be gross barbarians at the present 
day; though the opening up of the Nubian 
Desert in the search for gold, precious stones 
and mineral oil bids fair to civilize them at 
last. 

Originally they were known, from the 
confines of Abyssinia to the Nubian Nile and 
about as far north as the 24th degree of N, 
latitude, as the " Bugait " (if we may guess at 
the Egyptian word which the Greeks turned 
into Bougaeitai), a term which became in 



m THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

Arabic Buja and Baja, and is now fixed in our 
nomenclature as Beja. On the Nubian Nile 
they seem to have called themselves " Dan- 
kala " or " Danagla," a name which recalls 
at once the racial designation of their far-away 
kindred, the Dan^kil of the country of Afar 
between Abyssinia and the Red Sea. From 
Danagla comes the modern European corrup- 
tion of the name of Upper Nubia : " Dongola." 
Nowadays their different sections are known 
as Bisharin or Beja, Hadendoa and Ababda, 
but the real tribal names are nearly always 
something which ends with -ab, such as 
Amerab,^ Shinterab, Omarab, Ashabab, etc. 
This tribal suffix -b or -ab of the northern 
group of the Hamitic peoples suggests an 
affinity with the Hottentot masculine singular 
suffix which is also -b or -p. 

But the range of the Hamites does not seem 
to have extended northwards in Egypt much 
beyond the vicinity of the 24th degree of N. 
latitude. East of the Nile, in that region 
where the great river approaches nearest 
to the Red Sea, is a district rather appro- 
priately nam.ed the Arabian Desert, the coast 
fringe of which is very mountainous. Here 
dwelt in remote antiquity — say eight or nine 
thousand years ago — an advance-guard of the 
Semitic peoples who warred with the Libyans 
in Lower Egypt, and at one time took 

^ Not the same as the Beni-Amer of the refi^ion between 
Siiakin and Eritrea, who thouit^h racially akin to the 
Hamites, speak a language which is half-Semitic. 



THE EARLY SEMITES 67 

possession of the deltaic region (then much 
smaller in area). A remnant of these Proto- 
Semites (no doubt reinforced by the invasions 
of the Hyksos and Islamite Arabs) seems to 
linger in the Arabian Desert to this day. 
The dialects of these "Bedui" (Beduin) 
Arabs contain some Hamitic or even Libyan 
words, but seem to be in the main an archaic 
form of Arabic. 

After the Egyptians, coming from Arabia 
or Somaliland, had established themselves 
as the lords of the Lower Nile, there began a 
Sabsean (Semitic) invasion of Abyssinia, pos- 
sibly as early as five thousand years ago. 
According to the opinions of French ethnol- 
ogists, Abyssinia had received a partial colon- 
ization at a much earlier date by a white 
people of Libyan affinities, racial traces of 
whom remain to this day; and these Libyans 
had partly fused with an antecedent Hamitic 
stock (represented by the modern Agau, 
Bogos, Gala, etc.) which in its turn had dis- 
possessed or absorbed savages of Bushman 
or Negro race. The Semites who made them- 
selves the ruling caste in Abyssinia were off- 
shoots of the Minsean and Sabaean peoples of 
south-west and south Arabia; and their 
language — now called Ge'ez or Ethiopic — was 
a branch of the south Arabian Semitic speech. 
Ethiopic is now a dead language, but it has 
given birth in the course of several thousand 
years to five daughter languages still Semitic 
in their main features. These are (beginning 

C 2 



68 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

on the north) Tigre, Tigrinya, Amharic, 
Harrari, and Guragwe. 

Similar invasions from Arabia at subsequent 
periods carried Semitic settlers and dialects 
through Somaliland to Harrar, and these 
colonists no doubt were the builders of the 
stone cities in northern Somaliland the ruins 
of which are one of the many riddles in Africa 
as yet unexplained. For some reason however 
both the Semites who invaded Abyssinia and 
created principalities there of some importance, 
and those who colonized northern Somaliland, 
left severely alone the sterile coast country of 
Afar between the Abyssinian mountains and 
the Red Sea, which for a very long period has 
been inhabited by a branch of the Somali-Gala 
race, the Danakil. 

The dynastic Egyptians left the region 
between Suakin and Masawa and all Abyssinia 
and Somaliland without any attempt at 
conquest; but as soon as the kingdoms of 
Upper and Lower Egypt were organized and 
combined under one great king, shipbuilding 
made much progress, and fairly large ships 
with sails were put together on the Red Sea 
at Kosseir and no doubt opened up a trade 
between Egypt and . all the Arabian and 
Abyssinian ports. When the troubles of the 
Hyksos invasion had cleared away the Egyp- 
tians bethought themselves of reopening com- 
munications with the Land of Punt or Puoni, 
from which their ancestors had migrated to 
the Nile valley, the land " where the incense 



THE EARLY SEMITES 69 

trees grew." It is probable that the original 
land of Punt really lay in southern Arabia, 
but the Egyptian fleet sent out by the great 
Queen Hatshopsitu about 1470 B.C. kept more 
to the African littoral and opened up friendly 
relations with the coast of Afar and northern 
Somaliland (especially the district round 
Tajurrah Bay). The officers of this expedition 
found the people of African Punt living very 
much in the same style as the heathen Galas 
or the Ba-hima of Uganda at the present day ; 
both men and women having little regard for 
clothes and as often as not going naked, though 
people of consequence wore ivory and perhaps 
copper rings round their legs and arms, and 
decorated their hair with ostrich feathers. 
Also then, as now, women of rank were 
encouraged to grow enormously fat; and fat 
queens became a leading feature in the life 
of Hamitic Nubia and Dongola during the 
centuries which preceded the establishment 
of Christianity. The same mania for fattening 
women exists still among the Moors and 
Berbers of North-west Africa. 

This maritime intercourse between Egypt 
and the African land of Punt was an additional 
means of conveying Egyptian domestic ani- 
mals, cultivated plants and manufactured 
products into Negroland ; for the early Hamites 
and southern Arabs certainly traded with 
Equatorial and East Africa long before the 
beginning of the Christian era. The southern 
Arabs also carried on a commerce with India 



70 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

as early as a thousand years before Christ, 
and this Oriental trade (alluded to in the Old 
Testament as bringing peacocks, monkeys, 
gold, ivory, ebony and sandalwood to the 
dominions of Solomon), also brought India and 
East Africa into relations with each other. 
The pioneers of this transoceanic trade may 
have been the Polynesian adventurers who 
passed from Sumatra and Java, via Ceylon and 
the Maldives, to Madagaskar. By some such 
traffic the cultivated banana (which first arose 
from the wild form in Eastern Asia) and the 
Taro arum-root (Colocasia) reached the lands 
of the Negroes and found their way across 
Africa as quickly as tobacco and other foreign 
products have since done. It may also have 
been this early Arab trade between India, 
Abyssinia and East Africa which introduced 
the humped Zebu ox into Negro Africa and 
Madagaskar, perhaps also the domestic fowl. 

The wonderful white man of the dark- 
haired Mediterranean type or of the fair- 
haired Nordic stock was like a renaissance of 
man himself : he would not leave the world 
alone. Just as primitive man, even when 
only Homo primigenius and before he became 
Homo sapiens, ranged far and wide over Asia, 
Europe, and perhaps America, after he emerged 
definitely from apehood, so when the white 
man was born from out of the early stock of 
Homo sapiens in Europe or Western Asia, he 
started out to colonize the world anew with 
a human type which had risen above the 



THE EARLY SEMITES 71 

condition of the early Palaeolithic savage — the 
hunter, the predatory animal only. Not 
only did the white man permeate Northern 
and perhaps North-eastern Africa and West- 
ern Asia, but he seems to have pushed 
right across Asia in prehistoric times till he 
reached the north-eastern extremity of that 
continent, penetrating thence into the New 
World, where, mingling with previous immi- 
grants of a low Mongolian type, he brought 
about by intermixture the Amerindian, who 
is quite half white man in his body and mind. 
As regards Asia, the white man permeated 
India and Malaysia, and reached Sumatra 
and Oceania. In this last direction he min- 
gled with antecedent Australoids (Melan- 
esians) and formed the Polynesian race, 
which hybrid may also have reached the 
western coasts of the Americas and have 
contributed an element to the Amerindian 
peoples. The evolution of the Polynesian 
type may have taken place in Sumatra or 
on the Malay Peninsula. It seems to have 
brought into being the Malay or Polynesian 
speech-family and to have stirred up amongst 
the non-Negro, Mongoloid populations of these 
great Malay islands a considerable enterprise 
in oversea adventure. Something much 
better than the original dug-out canoe was 
constructed, a canoe with outriggers which 
could remain afloat on the agitated sea. 
Possibly even bigger boats, not to say junks 
or ships, were here evolved, which could 



72 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

progress by means of mat sails. At any rate, 
with their boats and outrigger canoes these 
Polynesian peoples commenced a marvellous 
era of colonization some five thousand to one 
thousand years ago. 

They reached across the Pacific as far as 
Easter Island, within a thousand miles of the 
coast of South America, and left traces there 
of a remarkable development of civilization. 
They colonized a few islands to the east of 
New Guinea, but took little hold on the coasts 
of that island, no doubt owing to the way in 
which they died from malarial germs conveyed 
to them by mosquitoes from the blood of the 
Negro peoples. But they occupied the Sand- 
wich Islands and New Zealand. Nor were 
their exploring energies only directed east- 
wards till they reached the Far West : they 
crossed the Bay of Bengal (there is reason to 
believe) and settled along the coasts of Ceylon 
and of prehistoric India, or India just entering 
into the historical period. Again embarked 
on adventure and impelled by the wind of the 
monsoon and the ocean currents, they allowed 
themselves to be carried to the Maldive 
Islands ^ and thence across the Indian Ocean 
in a south-westerly direction, perhaps halting 
at the Seychelles Islands, the Amirante, the 

^ The root of this and other place-names in South 
India and Ceylon — Mala — suggests remembrances of the 
" Malagasy," as the Polynesian people of Madagaskar 
call themselves. The name Madagaskar is the old Arab 
name for the island. 



THE EARLY SEMITES 73 

Providence groups, and other archipelagoes of 
coral islands by the way. (There are on Praslin 
and Frigate islands traces of an ancient 
human habitation. But when the Seychelles 
were first discovered by the Portuguese they 
were without inhabitants.) By some ocean 
route or other, at a period as yet only vaguely 
fixed in time — between three thousand and 
two thousand five hundred years ago — they 
reached the north end of Madagaskar, and 
probably found this great island uninhabited 
by man. 

These Polynesian emigrants spread all over 
Madagaskar, which was then tenanted by 
enormous birds bigger than an ostrich — the 
Aepyornis — and by great lemurs nearly as 
big as a man (Megaladapis), which, like the 
Aepyornis, have become extinct within the 
last thousand years. Many varieties of 
smaller lemurs inhabited the dense forests. 
There was a peculiar carnivore (still existing), 
the Fossa (Cryptoprocta), which is neither cat, 
dog, weasel nor civet, but something like the 
parent form of these flesh-eating animals. 
Perhaps there still lingered small hippopotami 
in the rivers, descendants of those which had 
swum over from Africa by way of the Comoro 
Islands. There was also a type of bush-pig, 
which still remains, though the hippopotamus 
is extinct. The Madagaskar rivers swarmed 
with large specimens of the common African 
crocodile; but in a general way Madagaskar 
was without any serious enemy to man. 



74 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

The question is still undetermined by any 
conclusive evidence as to whether Madagaskar 
was entirely without human inhabitants when 
the first colonists arrived from across the 
Indian Ocean. It has been sometimes thought 
that the strong negro intermixture in the 
present population is not entirely of recent 
origin, but is due to a people of Bushman or 
East African Negro race having reached this 
great island from the opposite coast of Mozam- 
bique. But although the Comoro Islands do 
to a certain extent act as stepping-stones from 
East Africa to Madagaskar, they are still 
sufficiently separate from the Dark Continent 
to make the intervening voyage almost 
impossibly dangerous for the simple dug-out 
canoe, which is all the negro could have 
invented on his own account down to the 
arrival of the Arabs on the Zanzibar coast. 
And Bushmen — still more, the antecedent race 
of Negro savages, the Strandloopers — are 
scarcely likely to have used even dug-out 
canoes. There cannot have been within 
recent times any greater approach to a land 
bridge between East Africa and Madagaskar, 
or it would have been made use of by other 
animals than the hippopotami, pigs and 
crocodiles. Moreover, as yet no human 
remains of any antiquity have been found 
in Madagaskar, though the island is rich in 
recent fossils of strange lemurs and birds. 

But it seems to be more and more evident 
that several centuries before Christ the 



THE EARLY SEMITES 75 

Sabaeans, Min^ans, or other tribes of south 
Arabian stock (Himyarite), had developed a 
maritime trade between western, southern 
and eastern Arabia and India, and between 
western Arabia and East Africa. Not only 
had . southern Semites — Sabssans — colonized 
Abyssinia and even Somaliland, but they had 
begun to establish colonies in " Azan " (East 
Africa) on such islands off the coast as Zanzi- 
bar and Mozambique. Is it possible — notwith- 
standing all reasons asserted to the contrary — 
that they were the originators of the gold- 
mining operations south of the Zambezi ? In 
their voyages they not only discovered the 
Comoro Islands, but undoubtedly reached 
Madagaskar, It was they, perhaps, who 
conveyed Bantu negro slaves to populate the 
Comoro Islands and the west coast of Mada- 
gaskar. They brought to the Malagasy tribes 
of Madagaskar — still speaking their Polynesian 
language down to to-day — the domestic ox 
(which is known by its Bantu negro name in 
Madagaskar) and the domestic fowl. They 
introduced a good many arts and crafts of the 
white man, and left the imprint of Himyaritic 
Arabic on the Malay speech of Madagaskar. 
And for a variety of reasons this early Arab 
influence must have been exercised over 
Madagaskar before the rise of Islam had 
changed Arabian religious beliefs. 

The most resolute, warlike and Mongolian 
of the Malagasy tribes — namely, that which 
had least mingled with Melanesians or negro 



76 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

' r 

immigrants from East Africa — was the Hova, 
inhabiting the plateau region of east-central 
Madagaskar. About one hundred and twenty 
years ago they contrived to obtain the mastery 
over all the other tribes of the island, 
and subsequently entered into political re- 
lations with the French and English. But 
the power and influence of the original 
Malagasy immigrants must have been suffi- 
ciently strong, after the Arabs and negroes 
arrived, to have permeated the whole island, 
for there is but one type of native language 
spoken throughout Madagaskar at the present 
day — the Malagasy. This at most divides 
into a number of different dialects, even though 
some of the people who speak it on the west 
coast are almost negroes in appearance. The 
Arab trade with India, however, also affected 
somewhat the north of Madagaskar, for there 
seems to have been a slight immigration, 
before the Muhammadan era, of natives of 
India to the coasts and islands of north 
Madagaskar and the Comoro Archipelago, an 
emigration which has left its traces here and 
there in the physique and good looks of the 
people. 

Another branch of the Semitic peoples — 
the Phoenicians — played a notable part in 
the opening up of Africa. By some students 
of Arabia they are thought to have originated 
on the southern coast of the Persian Gulf (in 
or near the Bahrein Islands), to have travelled 
up the Euphrates, and thus to have reached 



THE EARLY SEMITES 77 

the Syrian coast, where they founded sea- 
cities on three small islands (now peninsulas) : 
Sidon, Arwad and Sor (Tyre). Their own 
name for themselves was Kinaxi or Kna, and 
Canaan is only a derivative of this root, 
which was also transported to Carthage! 
Phoenician is merely derived from the Greel^ 
phoinix = " red," and the Latin Pceni, Puni, 
a derivative from the Greek. In race, origin 
and language, the Phoenicians were north 
Semitic and closely allied to the Hebrews. 

Their first migration westward from the 
Euphrates may have commenced five thou- 
sand years ago, perhaps earlier. Tyre was 
not founded till between two thousand and 
one thousand two hundred years B.C., accord- 
ing to different estimates. But before this 
event the Phoenicians had ranged the Medi- 
terranean as hardy mariners, and had es- 
tablished trading stations and colonies on 
the north coast of Africa, had visited the 
Canary Islands, and perhaps the Azores, and 
had opened up a trade in tin, if not with 
Cornwall, at any rate with the Scilly Islands. 
Their first historical city, Utica, on the 
northern coast of Tunis, near the mouth of 
the Majerda river, was founded in about 
1100 B.C. by an expedition from Tyre. Sidon 
in rivalry established a trading town called 
Kambe, just where Carthage was subsequently 
built : in fact, when Carthage was commenced 
in about 813 B.C. by the runaway Tyrian 
princess Elissar, it was called the " New 



78 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

City " (Kart-Hadjat). Elissar is said to have 
been nicknamed Dido, or the " Fugitive." 
She was the daughter of a king of Tyre, with 
the — to us — extraordinary name of Mutton. 
(Other students of Semitic languages, however, 
spell this name from the Tyrian annals as 
Metten.) The story of Dido having obtained 
from the Libyan chief lapon as much land 
as an ox-hide would cover, and of having 
therefore cut a hide into tiny strips so as to 
encircle a wide area, is one of fnose many 
legends invented to fit in with a verbal conceit 
or mistaken meaning. Bursa in the Greek 
histories, meant (in Greek) a hide; but the 
real clue to the myth was that Carthage 
was first styled (in Phoenician) the Bursa or 
Busra, meaning " fortress," a word akin to 
the Arabic Basra. 

Between the tenth and the seventh centuries 
B.C. the Phoenicians appeared on the Red 
Sea, more or less as the friends and partners - 
in-commerce of the Egyptians, the Edomites 
and the Hebrews (especially when the latter 
were ruled by that overrated monarch, 
Shelomoh, whom we persist in calHng " Solo- 
mon "). The Hebrew kings may have allowed 
them to build ships at the head of the Gulf 
of Akaba, or the Egyptians have facilitated 
the passing of their vessels up the Deltaic 
Nile and through the canal which (inter- 
mittently) opened a communication between 
the Nile and the Gulf of Suez. By the seventh 
century B.C. they seem to have traded 



THE EARLY SEMITES 79 

between the head of the Red Sea, Yaman, 
Aden and the Persian Gulf. More than this : 
Herodotos tells the story (which recently 
unearthed evidence in Egypt would seem to 
confirm) that about the year 610 B.C. the 
Saite Pharaoh Niku (or Nexo) commissioned 
the Phoenicians to find out whether Africa 
could be circumnavigated; and that the 
Phoenicians starting from the Gulf of Suez, 
sailed round the southern extremity of Africa 
and passed through the Straits of Gibraltar 
(^' Pillars of Hercules ") into the Mediterranean 
and back to the Delta of the Nile. 

In" the course of several centuries, the 
trading stations and colonies of the Phoenician- 
Carthaginians, who retained for a thousand 
years and more their Phoenician language, 
extended from Bone (Hippo) in Algeria to the 
middle of the Tripolitaine, where they were 
checked by the Greek colonists of Cyrene. 
After the downfall of Tyre and Sidon, in about 
550 B.C., and the extinction of Phoenicia as 
a power, Carthage received the allegiance of 
all the Tyrian and Sidonian colonies on the 
Mediterranean coasts, and ruled the north 
coast of Africa from Tripoli to Tangier, be- 
sides the southern and eastern littoral of 
Spain and the islands of Sardinia and Sicily. 
Beyond Tangier the Carthaginians, in the 
sixth century B.C., began to found colonies 
and trading settlements along the Atlantic 
coast of North Africa as far south as the inlet 
we now call the Rio de Oro, In this narrow 



80 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

gulf is a little islet which the Carthaginians 
called Kerne, and which is still locally known 
to the Moors as Heme. This became an 
important depot for the Carthaginian trade 
with West Africa. The people round about 
may have been Libyans or they may have 
belonged to the Fula race. These dark- 
complexioned " White men " obtained gold- 
dust from the watercourses of the Adrar 
hills, salt from the desert, and more gold- 
dust and possibly negro slaves from the black 
people on the river Senegal, far to the south. 
From them the Carthaginians heard, no 
doubt, of the well-watered country south of 
the great desert, with its abundant vegeta- 
tion, its flowing rivers containing sea-horses 
and crocodiles, and its black inhabitants 
living quite naked or clothed in wild beasts' 
skins. 

Accordingly, when in about 470 B.C. (or as 
some authorities say, about 520 B.C.) Hanno, 
a Carthaginian general, with a fleet of sixty 
ships, conveying thirty thousand people, pro- 
ceeded to reinforce the Carthaginian settle- 
ments along the Morocco coast, and got as 
far down as the mouth of the river Lixus 
*l (the Draa), he was tempted to push his investi- 

', """"7 gafions farther south, no doubt leaving most 
^^t^"^* of his colonists behind, and only risking a 
few of his fifty-oared galleys (called by the 
Greeks, pentekonteres). He obtained inter- 
preters from the Libyans of the Draa, and 
perhaps at their suggestion, made his next 



THE EARLY SEMITES 81 

halt at bhe little island of Kerne in the 
narrow, deceptive inlet of the Rio de Oro 
— deceptive because it looks as though it 
must be the mouth of a big river. At 
Kerne Hanno founded a station, which no 
doubt was visited afterwards at intervals 
by the Carthaginians, till Carthage became 
crippled in her struggle with Rome. From 
Kerne a tentative voyage was made to the 
south, and the ship or ships engaged on this 
exploration reached first a lake near the sea- 
coast (Lake Teniahia), and a little farther 
south a great river (obviously the Senegal), 
which contained many crocodiles and hippo- 
potami. The people round the lake shores 
were a wild folk clad in beasts' skins, who 
threw stones at them to drive them away. 

From, the River of Crocodiles ^ the galleys 
made their way back to Kerne. Then brac- 
ing itself for a further effort the expedition 
started a second time for the south, and after 
a voyage of twelve days rounded Cape Verde, 
and on the other side saw a vast gap or chasm 
in the coast (the flat estuary of the Gambia). 
On these plains they beheld bush fires at 
night. Another seven days' voyaging brought 
them to a large bay which they called the 
Western Horn. They landed on an island 

1 In the Greek translation of the engraved tablets wliicli 
recorded this story at Carthage, this river is named the 
Xretes. The Roman geographers called it the Bambotus, 
a very African-sounding name and suggestive of Bambuk 
on the Upper Senegal. 



82 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

in this bay (probably one of the Bissago 
archipelago), but left it in terror, because, 
although during the day there was the 
silence of the tropical forest, at night they 
heard the sound of flutes, drums and gongs, 
and the sky was lit up a fiery red with the 
blaze of the bush fires. The coast country 
after this (the season was no doubt the 
middle of our winter and the dry season) was 
one blaze of fire, from the burning of the 
bush. Streams of fire seemed to run down 
the hills into the sea, and at length a blaze 
rose so loftily that it appeared to touch the 
skies. When daylight came this " Chariot 
of the Gods " (in the Greek translation, 
Theon oxema) was seen to be a lofty mountain 
(Mount Kakulima, probably, which is near 
the sea in French Guinea and about 3,300 
feet in altitude). Three days' further voyag- 
ing in fear and doubt (still passing a fiery 
land) brought them to an island containing 
a lake. In the lake was another island, and 
on this were wild hairy men and women 
" whom the interpreters called Gorilla." 
It has been suggested that the interpreters 
were Fula people from the Senegal, and 
that gorilla is derived from the Fula root 
gor-, which means " man." The name 
gorilla was fantastically applied to the 
biggest of the anthropoid apes after its dis- 
covery in 1847, in the belief that Hanno's 
journey had extended to the Kamerun 
Mountains. The island in question might 



THE EARLY SEMITES 83 

very well have been Sherbro (at the south- 
east extremity of Sierra Leone colony), the 
'' lake " the Shebar estuary, and the island 
within the lake, Bendu. As a remarkable 
coincidence, Chimpanzees are still found in 
this very region and only a few years ago 
were quite abundant here. They were almost 
certainly the wild, hairy men and women 
which the interpreters called Gorillai (in the 
Greek translation). 

After catching some of the wild hairy 
women (the males of the band proved to 
be impossible of capture) the Carthaginians 
turned back and 'eventually regained Car- 
thage, where they deposited the skins of 
these Chimpanzees in the Temple of Tanit. 

No doubt overland trade routes also existed 
between Carthage and its subordinate African 
colonies and the western Sudan, across Sahara. 
The trade would be carried on by the inter- 
mediary Libyans, Numidians, Teda; and the 
Fula, Songhai and Mandingo peoples of 
Nigeria who had already, it may be, received 
some inkling of commerce and civilization by 
indirect intercourse with Egypt through Kor- 
dofan and Nubia. Or Carthage may have 
renewed frequently the enterprise begun by 
Hanno, and have sent every few years fleets of 
fifty-oared galleys to Kerne, and from Kerne, 
along the west coast of Africa, even it may be 
to the Gold Coast. In any case, during the 
third century B.C., Carthage sold much ivory, 
some gold, and many negro slaves at the ports 



84 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

of the western Mediterranean, all of which 
came from West Africa, though a portion of 
the ivory may have been obtained in North 
Africa from the African elephant which still 
lingered there. The Carthaginians had tamed 
the African elephant, especially a somewhat 
smaller breed which was found wild in eastern 
Algeria and western Tunis. They also ob- 
tained guinea-fowl from North-west Africa, 
and this bird reached the Roman world first 
through Carthage and was called the " Numi- 
dian fowl." (Afterwards when the Romans 
governed Egypt they received from near 
Abyssinia another type of guinea-fowl which 
they called " meleagris.") 

According to a passage in Strabo,the Cartha- 
ginian trading settlements on the north-west 
coast of Africa were destroyed (about a 
hundred years B.C.) by a warlike tribe, the 
Pharusians, who dwelt thirty days' journey 
south of the river Lixus (Draa), in other words 
near the Rio de Oro inlet. These Pharusians 
of the Greek and Roman geographers may 
have been tribes of Fula, inhabiting the 
country between the Senegal and the Rio de 
Oro. 

The descendants of the Tyrian and Sidonian 
merchants did not assimilate or mix in blood 
much with the Libyan peoples of North Africa. 
The rule of Carthage was as selfish as that of 
Venice, and when the Romans grew to be suffi- 
ciently powerful they found the native peoples 
of Spain and Mauretania ready to join them 



THE EARLY SEMITES 85 

against Carthage, whose influence over these 
regions perished quickly. Nor did her Semitic 
tongue leave any appreciable traces on the 
Berber speech after something like a thousand 
years of contact. This was the more ciu-ious 
as the Phoenician language was often adopted 
as a language of civilized intercourse by the 
Numidian princes, and lingered as a dialect 
of the coast towns of Tunisia down to the 
sixth century a.d., only perishing completely 
by becoming fused into the new Semitic 
speech — ^Arabic — which from the close of the 
seventh century was being forced on North 
Africa, 

In 1868 aBoer hunter named Adam Renders, 
pushing his way through the bush country of 
South-east Africa, north of the Transvaal 
(now-a-days styled Southern Rhodesia), dis- 
covered the remarkable stone buildings of 
Zimbabwe, and his discovery reached the 
knowledge of a German explorer, Carl Mauch, 
who in 1871 visited and described Zimbabwe, 
Soon afterwards it came to be known that 
there were other stone ruins scattered over 
South-east Africa between the Zambezi, the 
Kalahari desert, and the Limpopo. Building 
in stone being so utterly foreign to the customs 
and achievements of all negro tribes not 
dwelling in civilized European colonies, it was 
deemed impossible that these — or at any rate 
the more remarkable of these — masonry walls, 
towers, and carved stone monuments could be 
the work of a negro people. Even where in the 



86 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

western and central Sudan the negroes had 
obviously come under an indirect form of 
Egyptian influence two thousand or more 
years ago, and Berber and Arab instruction 
later, they had contented themselves with clay 
as a building material and had never made any 
use of stone (except very rarely for a little 
carving of images). So explorers, archseo- 
logists and romancers at once jumped to the 
conclusion that Zimbabwe and like vestiges of 
fairly good masonry work must be the relics of 
an ancient Semitic or Hamitic occupation 
of South-east Africa — ancient, because the 
buildings and the ornaments bore no traces of 
Muhammadan ideas or the Saracenic art of 
Kilwa and Zanzibar. 

If the ancient Egyptians, who were not 
exactly fond of sea journeys, could send fleets 
of sailing-ships three thousand five hundred 
years ago down the Red Sea to Somaliland, 
what may not the far bolder Sabsean Arabs 
and Persian Gulf Phoenicians have effected ? 
They, no doubt, as already mentioned, had 
opened up a sea trade between India, Arabia, 
East Africa and Persia, not much later in 
history than the Egyptian expeditions to 
Somaliland. Having accomplished as much 
as this, there can be little doubt that they 
coasted up and down the East African coast, 
making halts and trading-stations on islands 
like Lamu, Zanzibar and the Comoros. 
Undoubtedly, they had reached and partially 
civilized the north end of Madagaskar before 



THE EARLY SEMITES 87 

the time of Christ and had seemingly conveyed 
as early as two thousand j^ears ago negro slaves 
from the east coast of Africa to the west coast 
of Madagaskar. 

Were such pre-Islamic Semites (Sabsean 
or Hadhramaut Arabs or Phoenicians) con- 
nected with the beginnings of mining in South- 
east Africa, and thus the instigators, perhaps 
the architects, of the mysterious buildings of 
Inyanga, Zimbabwe, Khami, Dhlo-dhlo, Mpo- 
poti, Nanatali in South-east Africa ? Was it 
they who taught these prehistoric negroes to 
mine not only gold, but tin, copper and iron ; 
instructed them in the terraced system of 
agriculture (so common in Arabia) and the art 
of irrigating the fields with leats of water from 
the hills; and the keeping of cattle in stone- 
walled kraals ? 

Whatever was the cause, there can be little 
doubt that at some period not later than the 
eleventh century of the Christian era, and 
much more probably a thousand years before 
that, there had sprung up in Africa south of 
the Zambezi, east of the Kalahari Desert, and 
north of the Limpopo a degree of civiliza- 
tion not only far above the eolithic state of 
the Bushmen but much beyond anything 
attained to in recent centuries by the existing 
Bantu tribes. Personally I can see no reason 
why, even if the agents in erecting these pre- 
historic stone buildings and excavating these 
mines were negroes, the initiators of this 
civilization may not have been the same 



88 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

Himyaritic Arabs who between two thousand 
five hundred and one thousand four hundred 
years ago (at a guess) were colonizing northern 
Madagaskar and founding trading-stations 
on the east coast of Africa. From such stations 
as Sofala (near the modern Beira) they may 
have imparted instruction to an intelligent 
race of negroes in the use of stone for building 
and the simple methods of mining. These 
negroes or negroids may have been a mixture 
of Hamites and Nilotic negroes which perhaps 
permeated East Africa before the arrival of the 
Bantu and (mixed with Bushmen) created the 
Hottentot hybrid. Tribes of this Hamite- 
Nilote blend still exist in German East Africa 
and retain the use of non-Bantu dialects. Sub- 
sequently, just about the time when the uprise 
of Islam was distracting Arabia, and turning 
all Arab enterprise to the north, west and 
east, the forerunners of the Bantu may have 
descended like barbarous hordes from Central 
Africa, lacking most of the elements of culture 
but armed with iron weapons ; and have 
conquered and fused with the subtler, cleverer, 
more refined race which preceded them and 
which had won South-east Africa from the 
Bushmen. One reason why I am disinclined 
to credit the Bantu negroes of any part of 
Africa with the inception of these gold-mining 
operations in South-east Africa is that nowhere 
else has the Bantu mined for gold. He has 
native words for copper and for iron, but his 
languages ignore gold and have to allude to it 



THE EARLY SEMITES 89 

by a word borrowed from Arabic, Portuguese 
or English. The word in use for gold in South- 
east Africa is a corruption of the Arabic 
dirham (money). 

The Bantu invaders gradually founded the 
empire of Monomotapa and in a ruder way 
carried on the mining and the stone building 
of the race they had dispossessed and absorbed, 
a race which has left distinct traces of its 
Hamitic origin in the existing population 
of inner South-east Africa, and even of the 
Kaffir-Zulu tribes farther south. 
. The Islamic Arabs resumed about 720 a.d. 
their intercourse with the East African coast, 
and by the tenth century of the Christian era 
were well established on the littoral to the 
south of the Zambezi, in what they called 
(perhaps after the Bushmen aborigines) the 
Land of the Wakwak. According to native 
Bantu tradition such Arabs themselves came 
and mined as far to the west as the upper 
Limpopo River not many centuries ago. 

No certain clue has yet been acquired as to 
the approximate date of construction of the 
stone-built towns or fortresses. Under some 
of the buildings thought to be most ancient 
at Zimbabwe specimens of Chinese porcelain, 
or articles of Indian commerce which can 
scarcely be older than the seventeenth century, 
have been found, in positions which are 
hardly consistent with buried treasure. No 
human remains (skulls . or skeletons) have 
come to light which are not negro, and negro 



90 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

of the average Bantu type. No inscription 
as yet has been discovered on any of these 
ruins, no symbol, hieroglyphic or engraved 
picture associating them with any knov/n 
civilizing race of Asia or North Africa. On 
the other hand, the really remarkable wall 
masonry of well-fitted stones,^ the round 
towers (like those of prehistoric Ireland and 
Sardinia), the carved stone posts representing 
birds, the stone emblems of a form of Nature 
worship, the implements for mining and 
assaying the gold, are utterly unlike anything 
that has ever been found connected with an 
uninfluenced negro race in Africa, unless it 
be amongst such peoples as those of Benin, 
Yoruba and Adamawa, whose access to 
Mediterranean civilization and ideas has 
already been described as having probably 
commenced about two thousand years ago. 
Yet at least two thousand miles of dense 
forest, pathless jungle, swamps and broad 
rivers, inhabited by fierce wild beasts and 
cannibal savages, separate southern Rhodesia 
from southern Nigeria or the Gold Coast. 
If we ever discover the full history of the 
stone buildings and ancient mines of southern 

1 A kind of cement was employed to make smooth 
surfaces, but the masonry was dry and unmortared. This 
masonry is usually very roughs but where, as at Zimbabwe, 
it is neat, the' stone blocks have been obtained without 
elaborate quarrying. In 'this region the granite scales off 
the parent rock into long, narrow slabs, and these were 
split up into blocks approximately of the dimensions 
required. 



THE EARLY SEMITES 91 

Rhodesia we shall probably know that the 
earlier and more elaborate of these works 
were inspired by Semites and executed by 
Hamiticized negroes before the period of the 
Bantu invasion of South Africa. 

No account of Semitic influence in the 
history of African development would be 
complete without an allusion to the Jews, 
a composite race of Semitic, Elamite and 
Armenian origin (so far as race traits are 
concerned), and speaking in early times a 
North Semitic language — Hebrew — closely 
allied to Phoenician (Canaanitish). Probably 
the Beni-Israel or Habiru (Ibrim, " Hebrews ") 
originated eastward of the lower Euphrates 
and wandered westwards as nomad herdsmen, 
mixing by degrees with Aramaeans and 
Moabites. If there is historical truth in their 
legends they entered the Delta of the Nile 
during a time of famine; increased in numbers 
there; were enslaved by the Egyptians, who 
included them in their general hatred of Arabs 
and other nomad Semites (" Shepherd 
Kings"); and finally departed from Egypt 
to colonize a portion of Palestine and southern 
Syria. 

Under chiefs or kings like Sha'ul, David and 
Shelomoh this restless people attained to 
some degree of power, and held, for the first 
fifty or sixty years of the tenth century B.C., 
the coast of the Gulf of Akaba, while their 
long alliance with the Phoenicians of Tyre and 
Sidon interested them in the commerce of 



92 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

western Arabia and the regions beyond, to 
which access might be obtained by sea routes. 
Under Shelomoh (a name afterwards misren- 
dered Sulaiman, Salomon, etc.) they evidently 
commanded, in the tenth century B.C., the 
easiest overland trade routes between the Red 
Sea and the Phoenician coast of Syria, Phoe- 
nicia then being, between 1100 and 300 B.C., 
the Venice of the Mediterranean world. 
Egypt, until the time of the Ptolemies, evi- 
dently discouraged and penalized a traffic for 
international commerce through the Nile 
valley. Assyria and Persia did the like in 
Mesopotamia, so that the Europe-India-Persia 
trade had to go by sea round Arabia and thence 
through Palestine and Syria ; thus the people 
of Israel, who controlled the Jordan valley 
really, were for a brief period an important 
factor in the commercial politics of the Near 
East. And in that capacity they seem to have 
attracted the attention of a chieftainess or 
notable woman in Abyssinia, of Sabsean 
descent — the so-called Queen of Sheba [i.e. 
Saba — though Sabsean annals know her not]. 
In all probability some such a personage did 
accompany a trading expedition which went 
to open up friendly relations with Shelomoh 
of Yerusaiim. From this time onwards the 
Israelites became more definitely aware of the 
existence of the land of Kush (Abyssinia, 
Ethiopia), as well as of the south-west Arabian 
state of Saba. 
As the influence of Egypt and Tyre waned 



THE EARLY SEMITES 93 

and died, as their systems of theology, their 
hierarchies of cruel, capricious, lustful and 
exacting gods and goddesses lost their hold 
on the. minds of Semites and Hamites, atten- 
tion was directed towards the far purer, 
loftier worship of the Jews' one God, Yahve 
(Jehovah). So that when an almost endless 
series of political troubles swept over the land 
of Judah, after the conquests of Alexander the 
Great, the Jews who migrated as individual 
traders or in families or small bands, were 
usually well received in Abyssinia, South 
Arabia, and North Africa. In Abyssinia 
some two to three hundred years before the 
Christian era they were beginning to settle 
to such an extent that (after mixing with the 
dark-blooded indigenes) they formed in time 
a tribe v/hich still exists — the Falashas. 

About the same period, or earlier, they 
settled in numbers at Alexandria and became 
so numerous, wealthy, and hellenized there 
that it was necessary to translate for their 
benefit into the Greek tongue their holy books 
as they then existed — a version which we know 
as the Septuagint. From 300 B.C. onwards, 
the Greek colony of Cyrene (west of Egypt) 
began to attract Jews from Palestine as a 
region in which they might conduct a profit- 
able commerce and find freedom from perse- 
cution. The Jev/ish colony in Cyrenaica soon 
sent out offshoots to Carthage and, above all, 
to the other cities of Mauretania, at a time 
when the substitution of Roman power for 



94 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

that of the western Phoenicians had dealt a 
blow at the worship of Baal, Moloch, and 
Tanit, and set the Berbers wondering where 
they were to find a religion in which they 
could believe. The arrival of the Jews — 
especially after the great dispersal which 
followed the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 
A.D. — filled up the gap between Baal and 
Moloch and the inculcation of Christianity. 
In North Africa most of the Berber chiefs, 
after the Roman annexation of these provinces, 
became converts to Judaism and to the 
worship of the one God. Thus Judaistic 
practices penetrated to some slight extent 
across the Sahara into Negro Africa. This 
also occurred in regard to Abyssinia and Gala- 
land. In Abyssinia and in the opposite 
country of Yaman in south-west Arabia, 
Jewish proselytes or merchant, princes rose 
to be rulers during the three centuries which 
preceded the Persian conquest of 575 a.d. 

After the Muslim Arabs had overrun all 
North Africa and converted the Berbers to 
Islam, and incited them to extend Muham- 
madan influence over the Sahara and Sudan, 
Jews followed in the wake of Berbers and 
Arabs and reached the basin of the Niger. A 
few seem to have lived at Jenne, but Timbuktu 
Was their principal residence. Their caravan 
travellers in the early eighteenth and nine- 
teenth centuries sent to Europe from Morocco 
much information as to the geography of 
southern Morocco and the western Sahara. 



THE GREEKS IN AFRICA 95 

By the nineteenth century (and at the present 
day) the Jewish element in Tunisia, Algeria, 
and Morocco had become one of considerable 
racial and political importance. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE GREEKS IN AFRICA 

Greek interference with Africa in its begin- 
nings was scarcely distinguishable from Minoan 
or Mykensean enterprise. [Mykensean means 
the JEgsean civilization of the mainland of 
Greece and of Asia Minor ; Minoan, the 
special development of that early and remark- 
able culture in the island of Crete, with its 
legendary King Minos,] This high and early 
development of ^ga^an art and industry 
extended its influence from Spain and Sardinia 
to Asia Minor, Cyprus and Egypt from about 
4000 B.C. onwards. It may have originated 
in Asia Minor or the Balkan Peninsula far 
back in the Neolithic period, say, thirteen 
to fifteen thousand years ago. 

• The Greeks were fair-haired Aryans who 
invaded the Balkan Peninsula and the islands 
of the jEgaean Sea from the north-east. The 
invasion was, no doubt, largely an infiltration 
without any abrupt break in culture, the 
Greek language being substituted gradually 
for the non- Aryan* languages which preceded 
it. The Greeks following in the trade routes 
of the Minoan vessels probably began to visit' 



96 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

and trade with North Africa a thousand years 
before the time of Christ, and they seem to 
have created a number of settlements along 
the north-east coast of Tunis. The adven- 
tures of their seamen were the foundation 
of the stories of the Argonauts and the wan- 
derings of Ulysses. The land of the lotus- 
eaters was probably the delightful country 
round about the shores of the greater Syrtis 
— the oasis of Gabes, the island of Jerba and 
the region round the Shats or Salt Lakes (a 
former gulf of the Mediterranean). Here the 
date-palm was indigenous, probably reach- 
ing in this district the northernmost exten- 
sion of its natural range in receiit times. 
Although the date-palm may be seen growing 
all round the coasts of the Mediterranean 
it has been planted there at one time or 
another by the hand of nian. The fruit 
of the date may have been the lotos of the 
early Greek writers, though it is often assumed 
that this much-vaunted food was the berry 
of the Zizyphus or Jujube shrub, but it seems 
to the present writer much more probable that 
it was the fruit of the date-palm, which would 
make a stronger impression with its honey- 
sweet pulp on the Europeans of that period 
than the insipid mealy berries of the Zizyphus. 
The prehistoric markets of these Greek 
settlers or traders on the north coast of Africa 
(which, no doubt, were interspersed between 
the trading colonies of the Phoenicians^: then 
pjobably on good terms with the Greeks who 



THE GREEKS IN AFRICA 97 

had settled and civilized Sicily) penetrated 
far southwards across the Sahara till it 
reached the land of the blacks. Greek 
pottery, Greek ornaments, beads and metal - 
work in copper and bronze, early Greek ideas 
of architecture in building fortified habita- 
tions or cities, went percolating through the 
lands of the Libyans, the Teda, the Fula and 
the negroes, until they reached the very verge 
of that dense equatorial forest which acted 
for untold ages as an almost complete barrier 
against the civilization of the white man. 
The Germans have discovered in Adamawa 
and the hinterland of the Kamerun castellated 
towns, or models in clay of these fortified cities, 
which almost exactly resemble similar pre- 
historic buildings in Crete. Other evidences 
exist of the evident inspiration which Negro 
art received from Greece several hundred 
years before the Christian era, this inspiration 
having followed trade routes across the 
Sahara Desert. 

About 631 B.C. an expedition of Dorians 
from the island of Thera or Santorin (the 
niost southern of the Cyclades) founded a 
historical colony on the promontory of Cyrene, 
where the northern coast of Africa juts out 
into the Mediterranean between Tripoli on the 
one hand and Egypt on the other. Around 
the city of Cyrene itself (the name of which 
still lingers in the locality in the form of 
Grenne) were grouped four other cities— 
Barke, Teucheira, Euesperides and Apollonia. 



98 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

These Greek colonies persisted for three 
hundred years in spite of the civil wars and 
the intermittent attacks of Libyan raiders 
(ancestors of the modern Tuareg). The Greek 
hold over this district was then strengthened 
by the establishment of the Greek dynasties 
of the Ptolemies in Egypt. 

Greek influence over Egypt began at a very 
remote period — nearly seven thousand years 
ago — if under the geographical term " Greek " 
we may include the long antecedent influence 
of the ^gsean peoples who did so much to 
mould Greek art and civilization. But the 
Egyptians, though eager to trade with these 
producers of beautiful pottery, woven fabrics, 
bronze metal-work and domestic animals of 
useful breeds, were Chinese in their pride and 
love of isolation, and jealous of any settlement 
of pushing foreigners in the deltaic region 
which might subject Egypt to an invasion 
from the north. Nevertheless, as the Egypt- 
ian power waned before the attacks of the 
Semitic peoples of Syria and Arabia, Greeks 
were enlisted as mercenary warriors, together 
with the warlike inhabitants of Sardinia, who 
were possibly of Italic speech but in race akin 
to the JEgseans and the Berbers. 

One of the last of the Pharaohs, Psammetik, 
employed Greek mercenaries to assist him to 
establish his rule over Egypt and rewarded 
their services by allowing their countrymen 
to trade with the ports of the Nile delta. The 
city of Naucratis was founded by Greeks soon 



THE GREEKS IN AFRICA 99 

after 600 B.C. not far from the modern Rosetta, 
and became in time almost a Greek colony. 
Thenceforth Greek merchants and students 
of science travelled over Egypt from the sixth 
century B.C. onwards, and no doubt brought 
to their home country the first definite 
accounts of the marvellous civilization and 
architecture of the Egyptians. Indeed, the 
Dorian architecture of Greece seems to owe 
its origin to direct Egyptian inspiration. 

About 448-445 B.C. Herodotos, a native 
of Halikarnassos (a Greek settlement in Asia 
Minor), explored parts of Egypt and Cyrene 
and probably ascended the Nile as far as the 
First Cataract. He found his fellow-country- 
men settled as merchants and mechanics as 
well as soldiers in the delta of the Nile, and 
he noted that the whole coast between the 
borders of Egypt and Euesperides (the modern 
Benghazi) was occupied by Greek settlements. 

Through Herodotos, and even earlier Greek 
writers such as Hekataios (who derived his 
information from the Phoenicians), rumours 
reached the Greek world of the Niger River : 
that is to say, of a mighty stream of fresh 
water beyond the Sahara Desert, flowing 
through a land populated by black people 
with immense herds of wild beasts and an 
abundant vegetation. These vague stories, 
derived partly from the voyages of the Cartha- 
ginians, and partly from the trading expe- 
ditions which went on constantly across the 
Sahara Desert, resulted in a kind of confusion 

D 2 



100 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

of Lake Chad, the Upper Niger and the 
Senegal into a single fluvial system. These 
Greek geographers and historians also de- 
scribed to the civilized world of Asia Minor 
and the Greek peninsula : ostriches, which 
they conceived as being enormous cranes; 
the dwarf races of Central Africa, which pur- 
sued these birds in the chase; and baboons, 
which were described as men with dogs' heads. 
The great development of the Persian Empire 
under Cyrus had brought that power eventu- 
ally into conflict with Egypt as the successor 
of the Assyrian Empire. Under Cambyses 
the Persians actually conquered Egypt in 
525 B.C., besides then and subsequently 
dominating the western and southern parts of 
Arabia, from which they sent colonists across 
to Abyssinia and perhaps to Somaliland. 
Cambyses perished with an army in the deserts 
of the northern Sudan, imbued with a half- 
crazy idea of conquering the land of the blacks 
and finding his way to the sources of the Nile. 
But at that period Persia seems to have had 
little effect on the opening up of Africa. The 
intervention of this handsome, semi -Dra vidian 
people of Western Asia did little more than 
prepare the way for the conquest of Egypt by 
the Macedonian Greeks. Asia and Europe 
fought for the mastery of the Mediterranean 
world in the forms of Persians and Greeks. 
Greek valour and discipline and perhaps 'pre- 
potency of white blood conquered. Alexander 
the Macedonian laid the Persian Empire in 



THE GREEKS IN AFRICA 101 

the dust, and his victorious arms brought 
Europe as conqueror to the heart of India. 
Following up the Persians into Egypt (invited 
thereto by what remained of national feeling 
in that country), Alexander added Egypt to 
his empire in 832 B.C., in that year founding 
the city of Alexandria (on the site of aban- 
doned Egyptian settlements of considerable 
age) and making it the capital of Egypt, which 
it remained for nine centuries. After his 
death Egypt was allotted as a royal domain 
to one of his principal generals, Ptolemaios 
Soter, who founded the famous Greek mon- 
archy of the Ptolemies over Egypt, which 
lasted (latterly under Roman protection) till 
the death of Cleopatra in 30 B.C. 

During the Ptolemies' rule the power of 
Egypt revived and was solidified, and ex- 
tended its sway as far south as Dongola, and 
as far to the east as the verge of Abyssinia, 
w^hich country, indeed, was much influenced 
during these centuries by Greek ideas. The 
coasts of the Red Sea and of Somaliland were 
explored and Greek traders settled on the 
island of Sokotra. From these Greek explora- 
tions, combined, no doubt, with Phoenician 
and Arabian traditions, the geography of 
Africa was faintly outlined for the information 
of Greek and Latin geographers as far as the 
neighbourhood of Zanzibar and even the 
Comoro Islands, while the great lakes forming 
the head-waters of the Nile were first hinted 
at in the geographical treatises of the period. 



102 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA' 

no doubt on information transmitted by the 
natives to Greek traders at the coast ports of 
the region between Somaliland and Zanzibar. 



CHAPTER V 

ROME IN AFRICA 

About 150 b.c. the Latin power of Rome 
had become almost complete master of Italy. 
It had conquered first Sicily from the Cartha- 
ginians (who had taken that island from the 
Greeks), then Sardinia and Corsica and finally 
Spain; it had dominated Greece and Mace- 
donia, and established (in 168 B.C.) a protec- 
torate over Ptolemaic Egypt. In 146-145 the 
Romans, in their last war with the Phoenician 
colonies, destroyed the city of Carthage and 
founded the Roman province of Africa. For 
a time the Romans contented themselves 
with raising to an alliance with the Roman 
state the great Berber kings of North Africa, 
Massinissa, Micipsa, and his two sons, Adher- 
bal and Hiempsal. Micipsa reigned from 
the Muluya river to the Gulf of Gabes. 
Westwards of the Muluya was Mauretania 
(Morocco), ruled by an independent prince. 

But there could be — seemingly — no con- 
dominium between Europe and Africa. The 
Berbers were very near to the white man of 
Europe in race, descent and culture, but they 
were sufficiently tinged with the blood of 
Africa to be no longer in community of feeling 



ROME IN AFRICA 103 

with Europe. They may have absorbed into 
their midst the ancient Greek colonies along 
their coasts, and they undoubtedly displayed 
considerable affinity of mind (though they 
often quarrelled) with the Phoenicians, and, 
even later, with the Jews ; but they found the 
Romans a little too European to their Hking : 
too dominating, too fond of method, order, 
tidiness and fatiguing pubhc works. 

The Roman colony of " Africa," ^ which 
was at first just the north-eastern extremity 
of Tunisia, picked a quarrel with Jugurtha, 
who was nephew of Micipsa and displacer of 
his sons, but de facto king of Numidia and 
national hero. (Numidia was the name given 
to what we should now call eastern Algeria.) 
After a gallant struggle of four years against 
the Roman general Metellus, Jugurtha sought 
refuge in Morocco, was surrendered, and died 
at Rome in 104 B.C. In his earlier battles 
Jugurtha adopted a plan of fighting learnt 
from the Carthaginian armies. He had war 
elephants of the African species, which he 
placed in the van of his attack; but somehow 
they did not make much impression on the 
dogged Roman infantry. After the Roman 
conquest the African elephant disappears 
from the annals of North Africa and, no doubt, 
became extinct everywhere north of the 

^ The name is said to have been derived from the Afarik 
or Afriga, a Libyan tribe which formerly inhabited the 
region south of Carthage, but long ago retreated into the 
desert, where, as the clan of a larger tribe, they still retain 
the name Aurigha. 



104 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

Sahara except in Morocco, where — in the 
country near the High Atlas — it seems to have 
Hngered till the arrival of the Arabs. The 
camel had been introduced into North Africa 
from Egypt about 200 B.C., and was rapidly 
adopted by the nomad races of Mauretania as 
an animal very useful in war. The nearly 
naked foot-soldiers would shelter themselves 
between the camels' legs, and the camels were 
taught to bite the approaching enemy. During 
the sixty-one years following Jugurtha's death 
a number of princes ruled as satraps or vassals 
of Rome between Morocco and Tripoli, but by 
the year 43 B.C. the Romans had definitely 
annexed to their empire the Cyrenaica, and 
the remainder of North Africa, except western 
Algeria and Morocco. 

In 19 B.C. Egypt ceased to be a protected 
state and became an integral part of the 
Roman Empire, the province of uEgyptus. 
By 20 B.C. the Romans, under a Spanish 
general, Cornelius Balbus, had carried their 
arms in triumph into the heart of Phasania 
(the modern Fezzan). They marched from 
Gabes, in southern Tunis, to Ghadames (which 
remained for some time after in Roman 
occupation) and reached Jerma (Garama), 
seventy miles from Murzuk and the capital of 
the Garamantes of Fezzan, a people evidently 
Teda (Tibu) in race. A few years afterwards, 
just about the time of the birth of Christ, a 
Roman general named Septimus Flaccus, who 
had become the ally and friend of a powerful 



ROME IN AFRICA 105 

Teda chief, the king of the Garamantes, 
marched for three months southwards across 
the Sahara Desert, and is said to have reached 
a country inhabited by negroes. About 45 a.d. 
another general of British fame, Suetonius 
Paulinus, marched up the valley of the 
Muluya river in Morocco and reached the 
High Atlas range. He ascended these moun- 
tains to the snows, and descended to the 
southern side of them into the valley of the 
Gir stream, and gave a vivid description of 
the burnt-looking rocks of the desert and the 
swarms of elephants in the Atlas forests. He 
also noticed the strange trees of the Morocco 
forests : the Argania sideroxylon or Argan tree, 
which is really a survival of a tropical Miocene 
flora. Much later, about 150 a.d., another 
Roman general, Julius Maternus, started from 
Garama in southern Fezzan, accompanied by 
the chief of the Garamantes, and reached a 
country seemingly in the neighbourhood of 
Bilma, which he called Agisymba. He may 
even have got as far as the country of 
Kanem, for he is said to have journeyed for 
a space of four months and to have reached 
a land swarming with rhinoceroses. [The 
record of this journey is in the portion of 
history by Marinus Tyrius, which was edited 
by Ptolemy the Alexandrian : see Sir E. 
Bunbury's "History of Ancient Geography," 
Vol. II, p. 523.] When Greek geographers 
and Roman generals visited Nubia — ^the Nile 
valley in Dongola — at the beginning of the 



106 THE OPENING ITP OF AFRICA 

Christian era they found the rhinoceros in 
great numbers in this now sterile region, as 
well as elephants. 

The two recorded, and no doubt many 
unrecorded, adventures of the Romans in 
the eastern Sahara once again carried to 
Europe stories of a Niger river far away across 
the desert. Our modern name " Niger " 
is derived from the writings in Greek 
of the Alexandrian geographer, Claudius 
Ptolemaeus (Ptolemy), who, in his description 
of North Africa, alludes not only to the river 
Gir, which was visited by Paulinus in 45 a.d., 
and really exists in southern Morocco, flowing 
from the southernmost end of the Atlas 
Mountains towards the desert — but to the 
great " Nigir " farther to the south. The Nigir 
of the Libyans or Moors raay have been the 
Senegal, or it may really have been the Niger. 

[The Senegal is obviously referred to by 
Polybius (second century B.C.) and Pliny 
(first century A.D.) as the Bambotus, Hanno's 
Xremetes or Xretes. Mention is made of 
papyrus growing along its banks, of crocodiles, 
hippopotami; and the very name Bambotus 
sounds as though it were a modification" of 
some local negro word like Bambuk.] 

By the year 42 of the Christian era, Morocco 
had been annexed to the Roman Empire; and 
Rome ruled North Africa from within sight of 
the Canary Islands on the west to the verge 
of Abyssinia on the east. Her dominion 
extended up the Nile as far as that of the 



ROME IN AFRICA 107 

Ptolemies, namely, to the Second Cataract 
( Wadi Haifa) ; and Roman influence, no doubt, 
reached through Dongola to the junction of 
the White and Blue Niles, and was in touch 
with slightly civilized Ethiopian states and 
Nubian chieftains. The Roman Csesars from 
Augustus onwards ranked themselves as 
Pharaohs in Egypt, and took full part in the 
ceremonies of the Egyptian religion down to 
the reign of Septimius Severus. Indeed, on 
the great temples of Egypt, especially of Upper 
Egypt and the northern Sudan, they are almost 
as much represented in the pictorial records 
as the Ptolemies or the Egyptian Pharaohs. 
They patronized most of the faiths of Egypt, 
especially the worship of the goddess Isis. 
The cult of Isis, in fact, was transported to 
Rome itself and to other cities of the Roman 
Empire ; and before the universal official 
adoption of Christianity (which occurred 
between 330 and 400 a.d.) the gods and 
goddesses of old Rome had been almost dis- 
placed from their pedestals by those of Egypt, 
or by the Egyptian practice of erecting the 
ruler of the empire into a god after his death. 
The problem of the Nile aroused interest 
in the minds of Roman thinkers from the 
time of Caesar onwards ; and as soon as Roman 
armies began to penetrate Egypt, learned 
men sought to increase their geographical 
knowledge by following the Roman troops. 
Thus, Strabo, a native of Amasia in Pontus 
(southern shore of the Black Sea), who was 



108 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

born about 50 B.C., and became, when quite 
a young man, a writer on the geography of 
the Roman world, obtained permission, in 
24 B.C., to accompany the Roman general in 
Egypt — ^lius Gallus — on a journey up the 
Nile as far as the First Cataract. 

Spurred on by the Roman development 
and pacification of Upper Egypt, Greek 
exploring traders, mainly from Asia Minor, 
busied themselves much with Nile explora- 
tion at the commencement of the Christian 
era. Amongst these have been recorded (by 
Pliny the Elder) the names of Bion, Dalion 
and Simonides, one or more of whom are 
believed to have penetrated up the river 
beyond Khartum to the land of the Shiluks, 
but they chiefly explored the Lower Atbara 
and the Blue Nile. 

The Emperor Nero, though the Beast of 
the Apocalypse, had a certain genial interest 
in geography, and by his orders an expedition 
was dispatched about the year 66 a.d. to 
discover the source of the White Nile. . It 
was commanded by two centurions, and 
was furnished by Roman prefects with letters 
of recommendation to friendly Nubian or 
Ethiopian chiefs, one of whom ruled the 
principality of Meroe along the main Nile 
between the Atbara and the Blue Nile. The 
expedition was at first provided with boats 
built of planks, but these were later exchanged 
for shallow-draft, dug-out canoes, and passed 
apparently without great difficulty up the 



ROME IN AFRICA 109 

main Nile to the vicinity of Fashoda. It 
reached far enough south to come into con- 
tact with the great marsh which extends 
from the vicinity of Fashoda to the frontiers 
of the Uganda Protectorate. The passage of 
the canoes was stopped by the accumulation 
of water vegetation, which we now know as 
the Sudd; but there is some reason to think 
that by intermittent land journeys through 
the country of the cattle-keeping Dinkas, 
the two centurions may have reached as far 
south as the sixth degree of north latitude, 
the verge of the Bari country, or even as far 
as the Falls of the Nile above Rejaf. At any 
rate, they got well into the land of the naked 
Nile negroes; and the leaders of the expedi- 
tion lived to return to Egypt. But their very 
discouraging reports of the difficulties attend- 
ing the penetration of this region of hopeless 
marsh put an end to any further Roman 
enterprise in this direction. 

It was rather the eastern half of the 
Roman Empire, the Greek world, not the 
Latin, which profited by the establishment 
of Roman rule over Egypt. Greek traders 
prospered greatly during the first centuries 
of the Christian era, and extended European 
commerce with Arabia, East Africa and 
India. The work published by a Greek of 
Alexandria in 77 a.d. — the celebrated Periplus 
of the Red Sea — (A Pilot's Manual, not unlike 
the modern Admiralty sailing directions) 
shows us that the Greeks, by the middle of 



110 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

the first century of the Christian era, knew 
the Zanzibar coast well under the name of 
Azania. According to other traditions re- 
ported by historians of this period, a Greek 
merchant named Diogenes, returning from 
a trading voyage to India about 50 a.d., 
landed on the East African coast at a place 
he called Rhaptum, which may have been 
Pangani, at the mouth of the river Rufu. 
Thence, he said, he travelled inland for a 
twenty-five days' journey, and arrived in the 
vicinity of two great lakes and the snowy 
range of mountains whence the Nile drew its 
twin sources. If there was any truth in this 
story it is much more likely that Diogenes 
journeyed inland till he caught sight of the 
snowy dome of Kilimanjaro, and even the 
distant snow-capped crater of Kenia. The 
story of the great lakes may have been added 
from information received from the natives, 
but in the record of his voyage preserved by 
Marinus of Tyre it is certainly stated that 
the Nile united its twin head-streams at a 
point to the north of two great lakes and then 
flowed through marshes until it joined the 
river of Abyssinia (the Blue Nile). Writing 
from this and similar stories, Ptolemy of 
Alexandria actually fixed the joining of the 
Victoria and Albertine Niles (as they after- 
wards came to be called) into one river at 
2° north latitude. As the real latitude of 
the point in question — the emergence of the 
Nile from the north end of Lake Albert — 



ROME IN AFRICA 111 

is 2° 25', Ptolemy made an uncommonly 
good guess, though he placed the lake sources 
a great deal too much to the south. Carrying 
on the names applied to the various branches 
of the Nile by earlier Greek travellers and 
geographers, he distinguishes them as Asta- 
boras (the modern Atbara), Astapos or River 
of Ethiopia (the Blue Nile), and Astasobas, 
or the main White Nile. Asta is very likely 
the corruption of a native name meaning 
river, and Sobas suggests very strongly an 
affinity with the name of the Sobat, which 
enters the White Nile opposite Fashoda. 
The name of Sobat is sometimes given by the 
Nile negroes to the main course of the White 
Nile near Khartum. Astapos may survive 
under the modern Abyssinian name of the 
Blue Nile, which is Abai. 

Under the division of the Roman Empire 
which followed the reign of Constantine, 
Egypt and Cyrene fell to the share of Byzan- 
tium, and Tunis and Tripoli (under the name 
of Africa and Tripolitana), Numidia (eastern 
Algeria, southern Tunis and Tripoli), Csesarea 
(western Algeria), and Mauretania (Morocco), 
were ruled from Italy, though Mauretania 
was included in the prefecture of Spain. In 
the divisions of Christianity which followed, 
Egypt became the domain of the Greek Church, 
and Carthage followed the Latin rite and 
acknowledged more or less the jurisdiction 
of the Bishop of Rome. Greek Christianity 
did not finally prevail in Egypt over the 



112 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

worship of Isis and Serapis till the reign of 
Justinian in the sixth century of the present 
era. At that date it had penetrated to 
Abyssinia. In the centuries that followed, 
it reached even to the northern parts of 
Galaland, the Somali Coast and the Island 
of Sokotra; and up the Nile as far south as 
Khartum. It followed immediately on a great 
development amongst the western Hamitic 
tribes of the worship of Isis, and was not 
finally extirpated from the northern part of 
the Egyptian Sudan by the influence of 
Muhammadanism till the twelfth and thir- 
teenth centuries. In Abyssinia it persisted, 
as will be afterwards seen, but the forces of 
Islam renewed repeatedly from Arabia con- 
fined this Greek Christianity to the more in- 
accessible parts of the Abyssinian Mountains 
and the dense forests of the upper valley of 
the Blue Nile. Somaliland became Muham- 
madan from the thirteenth century, being 
invaded by Arabs from the Hadhramaut; 
but the Sokotrans remained Christians of a 
kind (related to the Nestorian Church of 
Mesopotamia and Persia) down to the begin- 
ning of the eighteenth century. 

If certain slight indications and traditions 
may be believed, notions of Christianity were 
carried by Coptic or Nubaic Christians across 
the eastern Sudan, and conveyed as far west 
as the country of Borgu to the west and south 
of the Central Niger. Here there would seem to 
have arrived about the seventh century of the 



ROME IN AFRICA 113 

present era several semi-white adventurers or 
refugees, who brought with them the account 
of a wonderful religion believed in by the 
great White people of the North, a religion 
which had for its central figure Kisra (Christ), 
a Jew, who had died for mankind and 
whose symbol was the cross. This mysterious 
religion, which contained many features 
incongruous to Christianity, seems to have 
lingered in Borgu down to the middle of the 
nineteenth century, and a description of it 
was given by Richard Lander, the explorer 
who subsequently traced the River Niger 
to its outlet into the Gulf of Guinea. But 
nothing seems to be known of it nowadays, 
the people of Borgu having become almost 
entirely Muhammadan in faith. Lander 
believed that the emissaries of this religion 
were Christian Tuaregs, but the Coptic or 
Nubaic explanation seems more probable. 

In North Africa Latin Christianity never 
obtained a very great hold over the indigenous 
Libyan or Berber peoples, who showed them- 
selves rather more inclined to Judaism. The 
violent quarrels and disputes which led to so 
many martyrdoms, between the Catholics 
and the Donatists, the Pelagians and the 
Arians, greatly agitated the 'Roman com- 
munities in Tunisia and Tripoli, but probably 
disgusted the Berber agriculturists and moun- 
taineers, who under no circumstances were 
well inclined towards an ascetic life, and 
who were wearied by this deafening clamour 



114 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

of tongues in Latin, about non-essentials 
in religion. Nevertheless, there were Berber 
Christians in the country districts, apart from 
the romanized Berbers of the towns. 

The invasion of the Vandals, in* 41 5 a.d., 
gave a great shock to Roman North Africa, 
and contributed to lay low the wonderful 
civilization which Rome was building up in a 
region singularly favoured as to climate, and 
perhaps as to natural products. The Romans, 
indeed, had not enjoyed a smooth dominion 
for five hundred years over Mauretania. On 
the contrary, it has been calculated that no 
period of peace from native attacks lasted 
more than seventy years at a stretch. The 
indigenous Berbers or Libyans — ^in their char- 
acter of mountaineers, herdsmen, or patient 
agriculturists on fertile plains, and of desert 
nomads and raiders, like the Tuareg — never 
cordially accepted Roman rule, and also 
harassed the Greek colonists of the Tripoli - 
taine and Cyrenaica. When the Vandals 
entered North Africa from Spain their forces 
were joined by many Berber tribes in revolt, 
and a terrible devastation swept over Roman 
Africa from Tangier to Tripoli. During this 
period not a few of the Roman towns, whose 
ruins strew Algeria, were destroyed or aban- 
doned. The Vandal kingdom died away in 
sloth and decrepitude. About the only word 
of the German speech which they imported 
into North Africa for the first time which 
has lingered in the traditions or records of the 



THE FULA, SOISTGHAI, AND BANTU 115 

country, was trinken, to drink, and the Vandal 
kings and captains in this land of vineyards 
lost their valour and virility in the abuse of 
wine. Meantime, the Byzantine power — the 
Eastern, Greek- speaking Empire of Rome — 
was rising to greatness under such emperors 
as Justinian. These Byzantine emperors not 
only reconquered much of Italy and placed it 
again under the Roman eagles, but by means 
of great generals like Belisarius and Solomon 
smashed the Vandal power in North Africa 
and re-established Roman rule from Tripoli 
to Tangier (531 a.d.). They rebuilt 'some of 
the great Roman cities of the interior, and 
probably reopened one or more trade routes 
with the Sudan across the desert. Yet in 
opposition to this European civilization the 
Berbers rose in revolt again and again, and 
when the last and fatal blow was dealt against 
Roman domination in this direction, by the 
arrival of the Arabs in the seventh century, 
some of the beautiful Roman towns of eastern 
Algeria and Tunis had been already abandoned 
by the colonists owing to Berber attacks. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE FULA, THE SONGHAI, AND THE BANTU 

One of the most remarkable of human 
elements in the present composition of West 
Africa and the Sudan, and equally one of the 
most potent of "white" influences in moulding 



116 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

Negro Africa is and has been the Fula people. 
Their origin and ancient history are as mysteri- 
ous as that of the Zulu in Southern Africa. In 
appearance the Fula man or woman of pure 
race is a handsome type of human being. 
They are tall people, beautifully formed as 
regards the proportions and carriage of the 
body, comparable sometimes to the much 
quoted Greek statue. The appearance of the 
face frequently recalls the dynastic Egyptian 
or Pharaonic type, the nose is usually straight 
and well-formed when there is no strain of 
Negro blood derived from recent intermixture. 
The hair is not by any means the negro wool, 
yet is not straight like that of the ancient 
Egyptian, but kinky and falling in ringlets. 
It is, in short, something of a compromise 
between the hair of the Caucasian and that 
of the Negro, without being so " fuzzy- wuzzy " 
as the head-hair of the Hamitic peoples, or so 
straight as that of the Libyan. 

The skin colour, even amongst the pure- 
bred Fula, shows some considerable degree 
of variation. Early English and Portuguese 
travellers in West Africa sometimes stated 
that the women, and occasionally the men, 
were no darker in colour than gipsies or 
the people of Spain. Others distinctly de- 
scribed them as tawny. Even at the present 
day Fula women may be met with in western 
Nigeria and Senegambia with a complexion 
no darker than that of the women of Egypt 
proper, and much lighter than the Ethiopians. 



THE FULA, SONGHAI, AND BANTU 117 

They are, in short, a yellow-skinned people 
with a tinge of red in the yellow. The root of 
their racial name, Ful, or Pul, is said to mean 
red, and they appear in times past to have 
described themselves as the " red people," 
in contrast with the black negroes of West 
Africa. But in the traditions of the Fula on 
the Hombori plateau, Central Nigeria, the 
ancestral Fula seem to have been white- 
skinned in contrast with the " red " pygmy 
races whom the Fula dispossessed in the Niger 
valley. They are, in short, so much like the 
Egyptians in appearance that it would be 
simple enough to derive them from that part 
of Africa, from which, indeed, they really seem 
to have come, though at a rather remote period. 
But amongst the perplexities concerning 
their origin are these points : They speak a 
language of a clearly defined type which, even 
though the Fula are widely spread over 
Western and Central Africa at the present day, 
shows but little dialect or variation. This 
language offers no resemblances whatever to 
ancient Egyptian, in its roots, its numerals, 
its grammar or phonology. In all these 
respects it is essentially an African tongue,^ 
which in its structure and even in some of its 
roots has affinities with several speech families 
existing alongside it in West Africa at the 
present day, and even with the Bantu language 
family, about which more will be said presently. 
In the Arab chronicles of West Africa (Tarik- 
^ Seej however J p. 16. 



118 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

as-Sudan) it is stated that the Fula originally 
inhabited the mountain district of Adrar to 
the north of the Senegal river, in the western 
Sahara Desert, and that they were driven 
thence southwards by the incursions of the 
Moors, so that they had to migrate to the 
regions along the Senegal and to the south of 
that stream. It has been suggested by one 
or two French writers that a Fula race once 
inhabited the Canary Islands and the Sahara 
coast south of Morocco, about the Rio de Oro ; 
that they were in touch with the Carthaginian 
trading settlements on the coast of Morocco; 
and that from them Hanno obtained his 
interpreters on his celebrated journey of 
exploration along the West African coast. If 
they were the Pharusians of Greek and Roman 
geographers, then according to Strabo they 
destroyed those Carthaginian settlements on 
the North-west African coasts. 

On the other hand, French explorations in 
the valley of the northern Niger and the 
plateaus which lie to the south of it (Hombori), 
seem to show that this part of western Nigeria 
had been an ancient home of the Fula : namely, 
that they were not new-comers there, as they 
are admittedly in those regions farther east, 
where they rule as princes and potentates, and 
which they have only penetrated during the 
last six hundred years. The local traditions 
of the pure-blooded and the negroid Fula 
within this great bend of the Niger, are to the 
effect that when their ancestors came to this 



THE FULA, SONGHAI, AND BANTU 119 

region at a period of time beyond their compu- 
tation, they found the country only inhabited 
by red-skinned dwarfs, whom they dispos- 
sessed : but to account for the black skins 
and negroid features of the Habe peasants 
there must also have been an antecedent black 
negro population. 

From earliest times onwards the Fula seem 
to have possessed cattle of either the humped 
zebu or the Egyptian long-horned breed; 
sheep and goats ; and perhaps domestic asses. 
While settling in the valley of the northern 
Niger they passed through the Neolithic stage 
to the use of iron. Here — in what was later 
styled the kingdom of Masina — they seem to 
have dwelt under more settled conditions as 
agriculturists as well as herdsmen. But when 
first encountered by European travellers in 
Senegambia in the sixteenth and seventeenth 
centuries they were leading a semi-nomad life 
as herdsmen only, though it is probable that 
there were Fula kingdoms and principalities 
in the Futa mountains, on the Upper Senegal. 
As herdsmen of a pacific nature they pene- 
trated early — between five hundred and a 
thousand years -ago — into Borgu and Gandu, 
countries lying to the west of the Niger stream 
where it directs its course southwards towards 
the Gulf of Guinea. They must also have 
exercised a good deal of influence at this 
period, and earlier still, in the regions between 
the Upper Niger on the north and the forests 
of Dahome and the Gold Coast on the south; 



120 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

for the languages of the northern Gold Coast 
and Togoland offer distinct resemblances to 
the Fula speech in construction, either because 
the Fula derived their mother tongue from 
that region or more likely because they im- 
planted on these negroes a certain type of 
syntax. The Fula on the Upper Niger were 
early converted to Muhammadanism — perhaps 
about the twelfth century; and in the thir- 
teenth century penetrated far eastward into 
Hausaland, preaching the religion of Islam. 
Where the Fula have had towns or have 
influenced the building of towns between 
Senegambia on the west and Hausaland on 
the east, the architecture in mud, bricks and 
plaster associated with these towns is of a 
peculiar type and undoubtedly offers a super- 
ficial resemblance to the architecture of 
ancient Egypt. But this style of building 
was really Songhai, and was obviously brought 
by this negroid people of unknown affinities 
from an easterly direction — from Egypt, 
directly or indirectly — and implanted by 
them at Jenne and elsewhere in western 
Nigeria and afterwards adopted by the Man- 
dingo and the Fula. A wave of Egyptian 
influence undoubtedly extended two thousand 
to twelve hundred years ago right across the 
Sudan from Darfur to the Benue and Upper 
Niger by way of Lake Chad, the Yo and the 
Shari rivers. Nowhere, of course, in West 
Africa or in any other part of Negroland 
(except the unexplained Zimbabwe and similar 



THE FULA, SONGHAI, AND BANTU 121 

ruins in South Africa) has there ever been any 
building with stone until the recent arrival of 
Arabs and Europeans. The rnost advanced 
type of building material is sun-dried bricks 
and plastered clay, built up on a founda- 
tion of posts, beams and sticks — wattle and 
daub, more or less. This style of building 
existed in Egypt and Algeria in remote and 
prehistoric times, before stone was quarried 
and used for building purposes. The use of 
stone in building seems to have been an in- 
vention of the white man, in the Old World 
at any rate; even if it was not an inspiration 
in America from prehistoric Caucasian immi- 
grants. Except where the Negro has been 
influenced by lighter skinned races, he has 
no thought of putting one stone on another, 
but builds his house, or shelter, of sticks, grass, 
palm-fronds and leaves, unless he has risen 
to the superior stage of culture wherein clay 
is plastered on to a wattle foundation. 

A considerable civilization arose in Nigeria 
from a period which we may guess to have begun 
about two thousand years ago, a civilization 
which may have received a few hints con- 
veyed across the Sahara or along the Atlantic 
coast from the Carthaginians, but which seems 
mainly to have owed its inspiration to trade 
contact with Egypt, and through Egypt with 
the Mediterranean world. Even earlier still, 
no doubt, ideas of European culture connected 
with building and weapons had reached Ni- 
geria and the basin of the Benue from the 



122 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

Far North, but somewhere about two thousand 
years ago there were great stirrings in the 
Nigerian Sudan. 

According to native traditions gathered up 
by Arab writers soon after the commencement 
of the Christian era, a powerful kingdom called 
Ghana grew up in western Nigeria. Ghana is 
a name supposed to be connected with the 
geographical terms " Guinea " and " Jenne." 
The power of Ghana was succeeded and 
absorbed by the rise of the Mali or Mandingo 
Empire, which extended far north into the 
western Sahara some nine hundred years ago. 

The Mandingoes may have represented the 
farthest penetration westwards of this wave 
of Egyptian influence. The Mandingo language 
family offers some slight affinities with the 
Nilotic tongues of North-east Africa, and the 
look of the Mandingo people constantly sug- 
gests the negroid rather than the negro. The 
handsome, black-skinned Wolofs (with clear- 
cut Ethiopian features), inhabiting the coast 
region of Senegal and the lower part of that 
river, no doubt also received some of this 
impregnation of Eastern culture, but perhaps 
more through their association with the Fula. 
Some faint reflex of Egyptian and even Roman 
influence penetrated to the Gulf of Guinea on 
the Gold Coast and in Benin. But with the 
exceptions noted, the negro tribes of the 
Great Forest Belt remained quite out of 
touch with the white man's world as late 
in history as the great sea journeys of the 



THE TULA, SONGHAI, AND BANTU 123 

Portuguese, not more than four hundred 
years ago. 

By about 700 a.d. a negroid race known 
as the Songhai, or Songhoi, had established 
its capital and rule at Gao or Gagho on the 
central Niger, not far from the Sokoto river. 
In physique and in language at the present 
day the Songhai appear to be mainly negro, 
but with an undoubted strain or element of 
Caucasian blood. They reached Nigeria ap- 
parently from the direction of Agades, where 
their language is spoken to this day. It is a 
language which in our present state of know- 
ledge offers no clearly marked resemblance 
to any other African speech group, though it 
may turn out to be related to the tongue of 
the Tibesti (Teda) people. From the mountain 
region, indeed, of Tibesti the Songhai seem to 
have migrated towards the Niger, but before 
or after their migration to have received a 
considerable influence and influx from Nubian 
Egypt, and to have introduced into the 
western Sudan not only a faint reflex of the 
Egyptian architectural style in brick, but also 
Egyptian ideas of working in metal (iron and 
copper and perhaps bronze), improved forms 
of pottery, the arts of weaving, dyeing and 
boatbuilding (in place of the simple dug-out 
canoe). Songhai merchants are said to have 
founded the wonderful brick-built city of 
Jenne, at or near the junction of the Niger 
and the Bani, about 765 a.d. 

At that time and for some six centuries 



124 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

afterwards the regions about the Upper Niger 
were mainly in the power of the powerful 
Mali or Mandingo people, who were governed 
by a ruling caste of eastern origin. But about 
1469 the Songhai kings (who had been 
Muhammadan since a.d. 1010) gained com- 
plete mastery over the western Sudan, from 
Senegambia to Hausaland. In the preceding 
centuries they had converted to Islam the 
Fula, the Mandingo, and the warlike Mosi 
negroes (of the region midway between the 
Central Niger and the Gold Coast). The ulti- 
mate fate of the Songhai Empire at the close 
of the sixteenth century is related in Chapter 
VIII. It was succeeded by nearly a century 
and a half of domination by Morocco, chiefly 
exercised by Spanish Moors. After another 
fifty years of lawlessness, the Fulas arose 
as a conquering race during the nineteenth 
century, and under three separate leaders 
extended their dominion from the Senegal to 
Hausaland and the Kamerun. 

About the same time that the Ghana, Man- 
dingo and Songhai civilization was springing 
up in western and central Nigeria, Hamitic 
adventurers (together with the Teda or Kanuri 
negroids of Tibesti and Kanem) were found- 
ing kingdoms in Bornu and Bagirmi, perhaps 
also in the Kororofa and Juku countries of 
the Benue basin.^ Indeed, spurts of this 

^ Some authorities think that the open country to the 
north of the river Benue, between that stream and the 
Bauchi mountains^, was one of the regions of interior Negro 



THE FULA, SONGHAI, AND BANTU 125 

*' Teda " or " Kanuri " civilization, influenced 
by Hamitic wanderers from Nubia, passed 
from the Shari basin across the Congo water- 
shed right down into the heart of Congoland 
(the country of the Bushongo), where a won- 
derful isolated culture in metal -working, weav- 
ing, carving and pottery has recently been 
discovered by Mr. Emil Torday and others. 

Some such people as the Nyam-nyam (in 
whose country — the southern Bahr-al-Ghazal 
— at the present day ancient Egyptian 
amulets and other relics are found) seem, 
together with the Teda or Tibu element 
from Kanem (Lake Chad) to have carried 
the white man's influence across the Mubangi 
and the northern bend of the Congo, where they 
introduced ironworking and the iron throw- 
ing-knife, which is nothing but a metal de- 
velopment of the boomerang of Palaeolithic 
man and of modern Palaeolithic savages (we 
know from Egyptian records that the boom- 
erang was a common weapon amongst the 
Hamite people of the land of Punt four 
thousand years ago); together with ideas of 

Africa first to develop a measure of civilization from the 
teaching received indirectly from Nubia and Egypt, the 
line followed being through Darfur, Wadai^ Bagirmi and 
the Musgu country. The Musgu speech betrays distinct 
sign of having, like Hausa, been long ago influenced by a 
sex-denoting Hamitic language. It has itself remained 
sex-denoting, though situated in the very heart of Africa. 
From Kororofa and Juku (where powerful kingdoms 
or empires once existed) civilization spread to Hausaland, 
to the inner Kamerun and perhaps the Mubangi, to 
Yoruba and Borgu. 



126 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA* 

pottery-making and such domestic animals 
as the domestic fowl and sheep : the goat 
having been, perhaps, of earlier introduction. 

Similar negroid missionaries of culture 
ranged all over Nigeria after about 700 A.D., 
and even penetrated beyond the more open 
bush country into the dense forests of Adam- 
awa, the Upper Cross river (Aro country), 
Yoruba, Benin, Dahome, and Ashanti. 

The Negro races of Central and East Africa 
in the meantime, but dating from an earlier 
period, were being subjected to similar wa\^es 
of Egyptian culture. A hybrid type, more or 
less resembling the Fula in physique (but not 
in language), arose in that region of western 
Nileland known as the Bahr-al-Ghazal, in 
the form of the Nyam-nyam (A-zande) and 
the Mangbettu, and still more markedly in the 
countries around the Victoria and Albert 
Nyanzas and the north end of Tanganyika — 
the Ba-hima. This handsome type of pale- 
skinned, tall negroids, with the facial features 
almost of ancient Egyptians, but the head- 
hair of negroes, was originally called Wa-huma 
by its discoverer, Speke, but Hima seems to 
have been the older and more widespread form. 
[The Wa- and Ba- are simply the plural prefix 
differently pronounced. ] Other names given to 
this type locally are the Tusi or Ruhinda, etc. 

The Ba-hima civiHzers of Uganda and con- 
tiguous countries, arriving from the north or 
the north-east (for some of them may have 
been of Gala origin) brought with them, besides 



THE FULA, SONGHAI, AND BANTU 127 

the knowledge of working metal and the types 
of the principal domestic animals, an improved 
method of boat or canoe construction superior 
to the mere dug-out; also ideas of religion 
and magic which must have had their origin 
in Egypt, or perhaps more correctly, in Nubia. 
Prior to their coming, these Sudanese, Nilotic, 
and Forest negroes of Central Equatorial 
Africa, together with the Congo Pygmies, and, 
in the east, the remains of a Bushman type 
had (we may assume), before this period of 
about two thousand years ago, only vague 
and simple ideas of religion, a limited belief 
in the life after death, in the persistence of the 
entity of great chiefs or strong men, and of 
the entry of these human souls into forms 
of beasts, birds, and reptiles. Perhaps, also, 
they acknowledged vaguely a god of the sky, 
who controlled the rain, uttered the thunder, 
and flashed the hghtning; and certain minor 
spiritual powers (sometimes thought of as 
assuming the form of a man or a woman, or 
dwelHng in the body of a crocodile, hippo- 
potamus, or lion) who dwelt in a whirlpool, 
a great cataract, a lofty tree, a cloud-capped 
mountain, or a deep pool. After the per- 
meation of these vagrant, wonder-working, 
semi-white men from the North a belief in 
witchcraft has since haunted most of these 
negro peoples of the centre and the west of 
Africa ; and in the westward regions especially 
more elaborate religious ideas have grown up 
which were, in all probability, derived from 



128 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

this indirect Egyptian influence of not very- 
ancient date. The Egyptian character of 
the legends, folk-lore, sacred numbers (such 
as the number 9) of the Ba-hima of Uganda, 
Unyoro and Ankole, is commented on by 
some ethnologists. 

Egyptian and Sabsean influence over Somali- 
land and Abyssinia during much the same 
period (three thousand to two thousand years 
ago) also introduced the working of metal, 
the domestic fowl (which came originally 
from Persia), a good many cultivated plants, 
and the use of the plough. Here is an 
implement, however, which has played a very 
limited role in the development of Africa. 
The plough — if it only be the jagged bough of 
a tree dragged along by men and cattle — is 
of very ancient history in Eastern Europe, 
Asia Minor, and Mesopotamia; and spread, 
no doubt, from these centres of Neolithic cul- 
ture to Western Europe, Syria, Arabia, and 
Egypt. The dynastic Egyptians used the 
plough, and its use extended south-eastwards 
as far (at the present day) as the lands of the 
Gala, in the equatorial region of East Africa. 
But the plough (common, of course, also in 
Mauretania) never crossed the Sahara Desert, 
and was never carried with domestic animals, 
cultivated plants, etc., to the Sudan or to any 
part of Negroland. The great agricultural 
implement of the negro has been the hoe, 
which, like the plough, had a wooden origin. 
In fact, in many parts of savage Africa at the 



THE FULA, SONGHAI, AND BANTU 129 

present day wooden hoes alone are used by 
the people, and are made out of a forked branch 
cut off just below the fork. The slenderer 
of the two branches is used as a handle, and 
the thicker is pared and flattened into a hoe- 
blade, having no doubt previously been 
hai'dened and pared by being partially burnt. 
But not even the hoe is universal, for it is 
unknown amongst a few very savage tribes 
of forest negroes, such as the Congo Pygmies, 
and was equally unknown to the Bushmen and 
Hottentots. These last possessed the more 
archaic digging-stick, which preceded the hoe 
as an implement in Tropical Africa. The dig- 
ging-stick was weighted at one end by being 
thrust through a naturally hollowed stone, 
or a stone of friable quality through which 
a hole had been gradually bored by drilUng. 

One of the principal events in the opening 
up of Africa from (let us say) two thousand 
to five hundred years ago, was the Bantu 
movement, a problem of the deepest interest, 
which is still only very partially solved. 

At the present day, the language conditions 
of Negro Africa may be thus summed up. 
Over all the desert or steppe region, bounded 
on the north by fertile Mauretania and Egypt, 
and on the south by the seventeenth parallel 
of north latitude, more or less, there are 
practically only six language stocks : (1) the 
Libyan-Hamite ; (2) the intrusive Arabic 
(dating mainly from the eleventh century of 



180 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

the present era); (3) the Negro languages of 
Nubia; (4) the Teda-Kanuri group (spoken 
by the Negroid Tibu and the negroes of 
Bornu); (5) the Songhai of Agades and of the 
northern Niger; and (6) Hausa. The Hausa 
language is a hybrid between a Hamitic speech, 
such as was once spoken in Dongola and 
Sennar, and a negro tongue of the central 
Sudan. No doubt Hausa began as a trade 
language between the white men from the 
north-east and the negroes of the central 
Sudan. Owing to the slave-trade and other 
conditions it now penetrates as a spoken 
language to the town of Tripoli, on the 
Mediterranean, and westwards to the hinter- 
land of the Gold Coast. 

Within the domain of Egypt and the 
northern Egyptian Sudan we have, of course, 
the intrusive Arabic, and in Coptic the remains 
of the ancient Egyptian, a form of speech 
which, as already related, was a very isolated 
member of the Hamitic group influenced in 
later times by the Semitic languages of Asia. 

South of this 17th degree of latitude, 
however, one enters on the Negro domain, 
where the language families are almost 
uncountable, and possess few, if any, features 
in common. They differ from the two prin- 
cipal language-stocks of the white man in 
making no distinction of sexual gender in 
their syntax [except in such instances as in 
the Bongo speech of the Egyptian Sudan, the 
Musgu of the western Shari, and the Nilotic 



THE FULA, SONGHAI, AND BANTU 131 

Negro and Hottentot languages, where this 
distinction between male and female has 
obviously been borrowed from the Hamitic 
Caucasians]. West Africa and the south- 
western part of the Egyptian Sudan are 
perhaps the most bewildering in their in- 
numerable language types. A few hundred 
or few thousand people will speak a language 
in one group of villages totally distinct in 
vocabulary and in grammar from the equally 
isolated language of the next group of villages, 
and so on. It is, therefore, difficult to select 
any one African language in West Africa as 
a widespread medium of trade intercourse, 
such as Arabic is over much of North, North- 
west, and North-east Africa. In the central 
Sudan there is the Hausa language, which is 
understood by some twenty million negroes. 
But even inside Hausaland there are a great 
many totally distinct types of African speech 
offering very few affinities one with the other. 
Yet when you have traversed a line which 
stretches right across Africa in the equatorial 
belt, you encounter a very different state of 
affairs in regard to speech. There is but one 
indigenous language-family over the whole of 
Central and South Africa, the only exceptions 
to this universality of type being a few patches 
of Sudanian tongues on the northern Congo, 
Nilotic dialects in East Africa, a click language 
south of the Victoria Nyanza, and the nearly 
extinct Hottentot and Bushman languages 
of South-west Africa. To the south of a 

E2 



132 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

zigzag boundary which stretches from Fer- 
nando P6 on the west to Mombasa on the east, 
lies the sphere of the Bantu speech. Within 
this sphere lie the most barbarous, the least 
developed and the latest explored parts of 
Africa, a third portion of the Dark Continent 
which was only seriously tackled by the 
intelligent white man at the commencement 
of the nineteenth century. 

No sooner was any attempt made, a hundred 
and more years ago, by scientific men to 
compare the natives of East, South-west and 
South Africa, than they realized they were 
dealing with a single-language family ; whether 
they surveyed Zanzibar, the Kamerun, 
Angola, Mozambique, eastern Cape Colony or 
Natal. And when, at a later date, Portuguese 
and British explorers began to cross Africa 
from one side to the other, it was evident 
that the similarity of speech extended right 
across this southern third of the continent. 

Of course, subsequent investigation has 
shown that within the northern parts of the 
Bantu field there are isolated colonies or 
fragments of other tongues which do not 
belong to the Bantu group. This is the case 
in the northern parts of the Congo (south of 
the Bantu line), in German East Africa be- 
tween Unyamwezi and Usambara. But these 
exceptions are so minute and so near the 
northern frontier of the Bantu as not to affect 
the general statement that there is but one 
dominant language-family throughout the 



THE FULA, SONGHAI, AND BANTU 133 

southern third of Africa ; whereas over the 
whole Sudan, between Senegambia and Abys- 
sinia, the forms of speech are most diverse 
and offer very Httle evidence of a common 
origin, except in the most remote antiquity. 

How did this situation arise ? The physical 
types of the negroes in the southern third of 
Africa do not offer a uniformity similar to that 
of their speech. It is not easy to call them 
all " Bantu " negroes. [This word in most 
of the " Bantu " languages means " men," 
" people."] It is true that the word Bantu is 
applied to a certain rather good-looking negro 
type to be seen on the Upper Congo and 
amongst the Zulus and some of the tribes of 
the great lakes. But this same type is en- 
countered in many parts of West Africa or the 
Egyptian Sudan, or northern Uganda, amongst 
people not speaking Bantu languages. Bantu 
Africa, as a rule, offers in a mixed or a pure 
form the following negro types : the Nilotic, 
with tall stature and very long legs ; the 
Forest Negro, with powerful torso, long arms, 
short legs, and prognathous face (and his 
diminutive form, the Congo Pygmy) ; and the 
Bushman with his Hottentot hybrid. There 
are perhaps also traces in South Africa and in 
the north-east basin of the Congo of what 
may be the most primitive tj^pe in Africa — 
the Strandlooper ^ — a long-headed negro of 

1 Strandlooper is a Dutch term meaning ^^shore- 
runner," for these savages formerly ran along the sea- 
shore feeding on shellfish. 



134 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

great prognathism and small brain capacity, 
a type which may be nearer than any other 
to the original Negro ancestor of the black 
peoples of Africa and Asia. All these varieties 
of negroes have mingled in varying degrees to 
form the Bantu-speaking peoples of to-day, 
some of which in the far south may be more 
than half Bushman in blood and yet have 
long ago abandoned the Bushman dialect 
for a Bantu language, while others may 
resemble closely the Nilotic negroes of Eastern 
Equatorial Africa, or be mere Congo Pygmies 
or Forest Negroes of the most repulsive type, 
while again some are more than half Hamite, 
are the descendants on one side of the first 
white civilizers of Central Africa. The hand- 
somest amongst the Bantu negroes or negroids 
are certainly those of western Uganda and 
north-west German East Africa, of the northern 
Congo, of central Zambezia and of Zululand. 

Where did this Bantu language-family and 
metal- working civilization arise, and when ? 
It is the theory of the present writer that the 
former must have come into being — ^much as 
did the Hausa language and civilization — by 
some impact of a semi-white race like the Fula, 
the Hamite or the Egyptian on a vigorous type 
of negro; an impact by no means necessarily 
connected with warfare, but the peaceful 
penetration of a fertile negro country by semi- 
white negroid adventurers who brought with 
them the ox, perhaps the domestic fowl, some 
idea of working metals, and superior notions 



THE FULA, SONGHAI, AND BANTU 135 

in hunting, and the simpler handicrafts. We 
know by the legends of Uganda that such pale- 
skinned, handsome adventurers from the north 
were received by their forefathers in ancient 
times as demigods. 

It is possible, of course, that the nucleus of 
the Bantu peoples may have arisen somewhere 
in the very heart of Africa between the basins 
of the Congo, Chad, Benue and Nile; before 
they were impregnated by this trickle of 
Caucasian blood and inspired by Caucasian 
energy to conquer the southern prolongation 
of the continent. This great Bantu movement 
from west to east may have taken place before 
these negroes had any knowledge of working 
metal and whilst they were still in the Stone Age. 

The first great concentration of the Bantu 
seems to have been somewhere about Lake 
Albert Nyanza. To the west of that lake they 
penetrated the dense gorilla-haunted forests 
of the Congo Basin, but found these peopled to 
some extent by Pygmy and Forest Negro tribes 
speaking languages related to those of the 
central Sudan. 

These languages also, together with others 
of a type akin to the Hamitic, the Nilotic and 
to the speech of Dahome and the Niger Delta, 
may, together with Bushman, have preceded 
the Bantu as the forms of speech used through- 
out the southern sub-continent. The first 
great rush of the Bantu as invaders would 
appear to have been from east to west across 
the basin of the Mubangi to the Kamerun and 



136 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

to Fernando P6, but almost simultaneously 
they invaded and took possession of the 
regions round the Victoria Nyanza, and thence 
pushed down to the Zanzibar coast. Whether 
they crossed over to Zanzibar, the Comoros 
and Madagaskar of themselves, or were brought 
thither by the pre-Islamic Arabs, is an un- 
decided point. The conquest of the regions 
between the Victoria Nyanza and Tanganyika 
was rapidly followed by the occupation of 
Nyasaland, Mozambique and central Zam- 
bezia. This last became another great nidus 
of the Bantu, and on the central Zambezi 
are spoken to-day some of the most archaic 
of the Bantu tongues. From here they 
pushed across to the Atlantic coast, where 
they warred for centuries with the Hottentots. 
Then in the form of the Bechuana they occupied 
much of South-central and South-east Africa. 
Last of all came the Zulu type from some- 
where in Eastern Equatorial Africa. It rapidly 
traversed the regions occupied by the other 
tribes, borrowing from them much of their 
language and mixing it with the East African 
dialect with which they had started, absorbing 
also some elements from the southern Congo 
tongues. Arrived in South Africa beyond the 
domain of the Bechuana, they were arrested 
by the sea coast and by the concentrated 
strength of the Hottentots in the south-west 
corner about the Cape of Good Hope. This 
they would have soon swept aside but for the 
intervention of the white man 150 years ago. 



THE MOSLEM ARABS IN AFRICA 137 
CHAPTER VII 

THE MOSLEM ARABS IN AFRICA 

In the seventh century of our era the 
dominion of Europe over Northern Africa 
fell with dramatic suddenness, not to re- 
commence for eight hundred years. Greek 
Christianity had overloaded itself with many 
superstitious practices incorporated from 
Syrian and Egyptian religions, and while it 
allowed great licence and inebriety in some 
directions, it encouraged in others an asceti- 
cism almost ferocious in its fanaticism. In 
short, it proved distasteful to the Semitic 
races (though less so to the Hamites), just as 
Latin Christianity had done with the Berbers 
of the west. The Arabs of Arabia had no 
doubt in a superficial way followed the re- 
ligious beliefs of Persia, Syria, Mesopotamia 
and ancient Egypt in the course of several 
thousand years, and of the flux of political 
influence exercised over their coast regions or 
over the Euphrates valley. Such faith as was 
more truly indigenous seems to have been 
a vague worship of the generative principle 
which at one time extended right across the 
southern Mediterranean regions from North 
Africa to India. This worship was symbol- 
ized more especially by the Mahrab or Mihrab 
shrine, which in its oldest forms (found in 
pre-Saracenic architecture in eastern Syria 



138 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

and western Mesopotamia, and again in 
southern Tunis) was little else than a hollow 
male emblem. With this alternated other 
symbols and fetishes such as may still be seen 
surmounting the minarets or in the neigh- 
bourhood of the mosques in southern Tunis. 
But religious ideas of a purer and loftier kind 
were already fermenting in Arabia during the 
fourth, fifth and sixth centuries of the present 
era. Judaism had become very popular with 
some Arab tribes ; and Christianity was at 
any rate inquired into by thoughtful men in 
the more settled districts of the north and 
west. 

Mekka (Makka) had been for a thousand 
years and more a market for the interchange 
of commerce between Syria and southern 
Arabia, and also a centre of religious pilgrim- 
ages in connection with what was little else 
than fetish worship; for the town possessed 
a great, black meteoric stone, a minor wonder 
of the world, which had fallen from heaven. 
This was housed in a rude stone temple, the 
Ka'aba, which was also the sanctuary of a (? 
Mesopotamian) god, Al-lah, and two or more 
daughter goddesses, Al-lat and 'Uzza, etc. 
In this region of western Arabia there uprose 
an inspired camel-driver, small trader and 
shopkeeper, Muhammad, of the Koreish tribe. 
After some years of rebuffs and guerrilla fight- 
ing against his native city, Mekka, he con- 
quered this town and succeeded in founding 
firmly a faith in one god, which, as its prin- 



THE MOSLEM ARABS IN AFRICA 139 

ciples emerged from his mind, proved to be 
little else than a variant of Judaism with a 
little admixture of Christianity. In his oral 
teachings, which were afterwards written 
down, edited and combined together in one 
sacred book — the Koran — he adopted much 
of the history and traditions of the Jews as 
given in the Hebrew books of the Old Testa- 
ment, combining them with some Arab 
traditions and variants of Jewish and Baby- 
lonian legends. Somewhat charily he recog- 
nized Jesus Christ as a great prophet, but in 
a general way the policy of Islam was directed 
against Christianity and Judaism, and as 
time went on the Jews were hated and de- 
spised only less than the idolatrous Christians 
and the loathed fire-worshippers of Persia. 

Muhammad preached temperance or ab- 
stinence as regards alcohol, and adopted or 
enforced tgjtefffl^tR?' prejudices of the Jews 
and other Semitic peoples against the flesh of 
the pig and meat which had not been killed 
in a sacrificial manner. He inculcated charity 
towards the poor of Islam and many right 
and just principles of conduct as between 
man and man. But woman was expressly 
relegated to an inferior position not only in 
social and religious life, but even as regards 
a future life in a world beyond the grave. 
It cannot be said that his religion encouraged 
sensuality, but by its toleration of polygamy 
and its suggestions of voluptuous delights in 
Paradise, it gave just that encouragement of 



140 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

/ carnal-mindedness which not only was lack- 
ing in Christianity, but was replaced in that 
religion in early times by a fierce disparage- 
ment of sexuality, which being pushed to 
extreme fanaticism in the contempt it poured 
even on the married state, had done much to 
alienate Oriental sympathies. 

Armed with this new faith and with a 
fervent belief that to die in battle against 
the unbeliever was a sure passport to Paradise, 
the Arab hordes swept victoriously into Syria 
and Persia, and in the course of a few years 
practically extinguished Byzantine rule to the 
south and east of Asia Minor. In 640 a.d. 
an Arab army under Amr-bin-al-Asi entered 
the delta of the Nile and quickly wrested 
Lower Egypt from the feeble grasp of the 
Byzantine governors. Thence it pursued 
(in 647-648, under Abdallah-bin-Abu-Sarh and 
Abdallah-bin-Zubeir) its victorious course 
through Cyrenaica and the Tripoli taine. By 
669 A.D. the Arabs (joined to some extent by 
the Berbers, who were discontented with 
European domination) had conquered the 
Roman province of Africa (Tunisia) and had 
penetrated by 680 to the borders of Morocco 
and held it tributary. In the following year 
the command of this army was resumed by 
the great Arab conqueror Oqba-bin-Nafa (who 
some years previously had overrun Fezzan 
and had made the Arabs known to the people 
of the northern Sahara). Oqba carried 
his standards victoriously to the very shore 



THE MOSLEM ARABS IN AFRICA 141 

of the Atlantic Ocean, and is said, tradition- 
ally, to have ridden into the waves of the 
Atlantic shouting that if there were worlds 
beyond that sea horizon they should yet be 
conquered for Islam. He was unable, how- 
ever, to capture the Byzantine fortress of 
Septa, the modern Ceuta. This was held for 
Europe by Julian, a count of the Roman 
Empire, who had become an ally and feudatory 
of the Gothic kings of Spain. There Islam 
received a check. 

The Berbers had no desire to replace the 
Romans and Greeks by Arabs, and a Berber 
warrior-queen, Dihia alKahina drove the Arabs 
out of Tunisia after they had captured Carthage 
in 698. Unfortunately this brave woman felt 
it necessary, in order to make her fatherland 
untenable, to order a terrible devastation 
of the fertile regions of eastern Tunis, and 
this action on her part in cutting down olive 
and fruit trees was the first step in the 
deterioration of what had once been a country 
of magnificent fertility, but which has since 
lost much of its surface soil by winds, floods 
and scorching sunshine. In 705, however, 
Dihia was finally defeated and slain. Under 
the Arab general, Musa-bin-Nusseir, the 
Arabs again surged westwards conquering 
perhaps the whole of Morocco with the excep- 
tion of Ceuta, which still held out under 
Count Julian. 

Amongst the Berber chiefs converted to 
Muhammadanism was Tarik, who became 



142 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

a general in the Arab army, Musa, the 
general of the Arab forees, placed Tarik in 
charge of the Roman-Berber town of Tingis 
(Tangier), and Tarik entered into friendly 
relations with Count Julian at Ceuta. Julian 
for some reason had quarrelled with the 
Gothic King Roderigo of Spain, and urged 
Tarik to invade that peninsula with his army. 
Accordingly, with thirteen thousand Berbers 
officered by three hundred Arabs, Tarik 
landed at or near Gibraltar in the year 711. 
Shortly afterwards he was followed by Musa 
with an Arab army, and thus Spain was 
conquered by the Muhammadans. 

Between the beginning of the eighth and the 
middle of the eleventh centuries though the 
Arab element in North Africa was small in 
regard to numbers, it was represented by 
a few thousand bold, rapacious warriors 
who had in a marvellous manner forced 
their religion, language and rule on several 
millions of Berbers and some hundreds of 
thousands of Romans, Greeks, Germans and 
Jews. North Africa was to some extent 
divorced from the Arab rule over Spain, 
possibly because of the instinctive dissidence 
of feeling between Europe and Africa. 
Idris, as an alleged descendant of Ali and 
Fatima (one of the daughters of Muhammad), 
had established himself in Morocco as an 
independent sultan and was again recognized 
as caliph (or lieutenant and successor) of the 
Prophet by most of the populations between 



THE MOSLEM ARABS IN AFRICA 143 

Tripoli and Morocco. In the ninth century, 
however, Tunis was ruled by an independent 
dynasty established by Aghlab, a successl'id 
soldier dispatched to govern the country by 
the Caliph of Bagdad. In the following 
century — the tenth — the Aghlabite sultans 
gave way to an Arab dynasty, that of 
the Fatimite caliphs of Egypt, who claimed 
descent from the Prophet's daughter Fatima. 
But the Arabs though few in numbers yet 
pushed their explorations far to the south, 
and urged the Berbers to make conquering 
raids in the direction of the Sudan. In this 
way they had penetrated — Arabs and Muham- 
madan Berbers together — along the Atlantic 
coast southwards from Morocco till they 
reached the mouth of the Senegal in the 
tenth century. It is possible that about this 
period they began to Islamize the intelligent 
Songhai and Mandingo peoples of the Upper 
Niger region. They also penetrated south 
from Fezzan through the Teda or Tibesti 
country to Kanem. 

The impetus that Islam gave to the Berber 
and Hamitic peoples of North Africa about 
this period must have led to much penetration 
of North Central Africa, even before the Ber- 
bers were reinforced by further Arab invasions. 
These commenced about the year 1045 a.d. 
Two Arab tribes, the Ikni-Hilal and the Beni- 
Solcim (originally from central Arabia, but 
driven out of that country by internecine 
wars and deported to Upper Egypt), left the 



144 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

banks of the Nile with the deHberate intention 
of invading Barbary and making new homes 
for themselves in the Far West. They were 
urged to this course by the Fatimite rulers of 
Egypt, who found these Arabs a great source 
of trouble and wished at any cost to get rid 
of them. Accordingly, some three hundred 
thousand of these Arabs from central Arabia, 
accompanied by their women and children, 
crossed the desert and encamped on the fron- 
tiers of Tunis and Tripoli. They defeated 
the Berbers in several battles and settled in 
southern Tunis and western Tripoli, but 
being partially driven out of these regions by 
the Berbers, some of their numbers drifted 
on westwards through southern Algeria to 
Morocco. They were reinforced during the 
next fifty years by other Arab tribes who left 
the west coast of Arabia for Nubia. Here 
they displaced to a great extent the preceding 
Hamitic and Nubian negro inhabitants of the 
Nile valley between the Second Cataract and 
Khartum. From this region they directed 
many and repeated invasions into Central 
Africa, and from them are descended the dark- 
coloured Shua and other Arab tribes of Darfur, 
Wadai and Bornu. Some of these Arabs pene- 
trated right across West Africa and, joined 
with other Arab colonists from Morocco, mixed 
with the Berbers of the Senegal region, and 
founded some of the existing tribes of mixed 
Arab-Berber descent in the mountainous 
country of Adrar and the regions north of the 



THE MOSLEM ARABS IN AFRICA 145 

Senegal river, which the " French somewhat 
inappositely term Mauretanie. 

These direct invasions from Arabia led to a 
great revival of Islamic propaganda in Central 
and Western Africa which had begun in the 
tenth century. A considerable proportion 
of the Fula people in the West became con- 
verted to Muhammadanism at this time (the 
twelfth century). So also did the countries 
of Darfur, Wadai, Bornu, Hausa, Songhai, and 
the great Mandingo kingdom of Mali, which 
at that time extended north of the Upper 
Niger far into the Sahara Desert. Pilgrim- 
ages began to be made by Songhai chiefs from 
their dominions in the western Sudan to 
Mekka. Thus they came into touch indirectly 
with the civilization of Europe. The Crusa- 
ders had recovered Syria and Palestine for 
a brief period of Christian rule and had re- 
peatedly fought with the Kurdish sultans of 
Egypt (who had replaced the Fatimite caliphs). 
Their chain armour made a great impression 
on the minds of the Muhammadans, who made 
haste to imitate it. As it grew out of fashion 
in the more advanced regions of the Muham- 
madan world (through the gradual adoption 
in warfare of gunpowder and projectiles) this 
armour found its way to regions of the Sudan 
and still exists in northern Nigeria; for again 
and again one is reminded that Africa is a 
vast museum illustrating human life at almost 
all periods from the most ancient Palaeolithic 
times to the most wonderful achievements 



/ 146 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

of civilization, such as may be seen in modern 
Africa and Egypt. 

As early as 720 a.d. colonies of heretical 
Muslim Arabs had sought relief from perse- 
cution by settling on the east coast of Africa 
between Lamu and the Rufu river. Early 
in the tenth century the Arab civilization of 
western and southern Arabia experienced 
a sort of renaissance, and about the same time 
a great desire for oversea trade developed 
along the Arab coasts of the Persian Gulf. 
The result was not only a great movement of 
commerce and conquest directed towards 
India and the Far East (which ended in a 
conversion to Muhammadanism of Malay 
peoples extending to New Guinea), but also led 
the Arabs to resume a trade with Madagaskar 
and East Africa that from some unknown 
cause had apparently declined in the first 
centuries of the Christian era. Muhammadan 
Arab settlements were created along the Somali 
coast at Lamu (whither also came a colony of 
Persians), at Mombasa, Zanzibar and Kilwa. 
Mozambique was occupied and the Zambezi 
reached about the twelfth century. At this 
period a flourishing Arab colony grew up at 
Sofala near the modern Beira, and the Islamic 
Arabs opened up a profitable intercourse with 
the great power of Monomotapa — the modern 
Rhodesia. 

Here they may have influenced the building 
or the repair of the typical Zimbabwe stone 
cities. The main attraction, of course, lay 



THE MOSLEM ARABS IN AFRICA 147 

in the gold of the Zambezi watershed and 
the tablelands of South-east Africa. Arab 
knowledge and influence scarcely extended 
beyond Delagoa Bay to the south. They 
nicknamed the stalwart, turbulent, naked 
Bantu negroes of all this coast region Kufar, 
or unbelievers, a word which in its singular 
form is Kafir. A brisk trade in slaves grew 
up for the furnishing of labourers to the agri- 
cultural districts of Arabia and southern 
Persia, and the supply of eunuchs to the 
harims of Egypt and Mesopotamia. The 
Arabs, no doubt, carried over many slaves 
from the Mozambique coast to Madagaskar, 
where they were disposed of to the Arabized 
Malagasy chiefs. The Comoro Islands were 
easily conquered and held by petty Arab 
chiefs, who assisted to populate them with 
negroes drawn from the mainland. 

Gold proved a great magnet likewise in 
the development of West Africa. Arabs and 
Tuareg began to hear of the wealth of gold 
in the forest regions of Ashanti (" Wangara ") 
and in the country of Bambuk near the 
upper Senegal. As far back as the eleventh 
century, when the Arab still ruled in Sicily, 
they had begun to acquire and to transmit 
to the civilized world of the Mediterranean 
some ideas as to the geography of Inner 
Africa, reviving and extending the old Greek 
and Roman stories about great lakes, rivers 
and mountains far away beyond the sandy 
desert which bounded North Africa. They 



148 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

had also coniinenced to introduce into the 
Mediterranean world black slaves from these 
regions, ivory, spices, ostrich feathers, leopard 
skins and strange wild beasts from the regions 
of Inner Africa. 

What did the Arabs do for Africa after 
the Islamic upheaval ? They intensified the 
principle of slavery. The enslavement of 
the Black by the White had begun — we may 
be sure — as soon as the two races met. It is 
evident from the remains found in the pre- 
historic graves of Lower Egypt that the 
Libyan race of ten thousand years ago had 
enslaved what remained of the Bushman or 
Negrito population. When ancient Egypt 
was in full development as a mighty empire 
slavery was an established principle. All pris- 
oners of w^ar were turned into slaves whether 
they were white or black, but the black slaves 
proved the more contented and docile. Con- 
sequently, all through the rule of the dynastic 
Egyptians and down to the Roman and 
Byzantine periods, the Sudan was raided for 
slaves ; or troops of negroes and negresses were 
obtained by purchase when slave-trading 
became a matter of private enterprise. But 
the Arabs carried on the principle over all 
that part of Africa which they could reach, 
and infected the Muhammadanized Libyans 
with the same idea. Slaves were required 
for the harims of the Muhammadan world, and 
to serve as soldiers in Persia and India; they 
were even needed for the cultivation of the 



THE MOSLEM ARABS IN AFRICA 149 

sparsely-inhabited districts of Southern Portu- 
gal. With the discovery and colonization of 
America the demand for negro slaves became 
one of the chief inducements to " open up " 
Africa, and although this attraction drew 
one European nation after another to found 
settlements on the West African coast, it 
also spurred on the activities of the Arabs, 
not only in the Western, Central and Egyptian 
Sudan, but along the east coast of Africa. 
Through Morocco, from the regions of the 
Senegal and Gambia rivers ; from Tripoli, 
Alexandria and Zanzibar, they supplied the 
British, French, Dutch, Portuguese and 
Spaniards, and later on the British Americans, 
with a large proportion of the slaves wanted 
for the cultivation of Eastern North America, 
the West Indies and Eastern South America. 
A few also went to the Cape of Good Hope. 
In most parts of Negro Africa the Arab acted 
as the instigator rather than the actual raider 
and snatcher of slaves himself. He brought 
trade goods with which he bribed the native 
chiefs, or he intervened as advisor or provoker 
in their quarrels and set one tribe to fight 
another in order that he might receive a 
proportion of the slaves captured in war. 
The movements that he thus set on foot had a 
far-reaching effect on Africa ; and even where 
the Arab influence was checked (until the 
middle and end of the nineteenth century) by 
the dense forests of the Congo Basin, the Kame- 
run, the Ivory Coast and Liberia, the idea of 



150 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

warring and raiding for slaves had penetrated 
to the remotest recesses of these regions 
amongst cannibal tribes who had never heard 
of the existence of Arabs or of white men, but 
ilnderstood vaguely that if they went to war 
with a weaker tribe such captives as they 
might make and did not choose to eat then and 
there, could be sold for trade-goods to another 
tribe farther to the west or to the east, which 
was willing to buy people for some purpose 
unknown. 

As the result of the slave-trade natives of the 
very heart of Africa might find themselves 
occupjdng posts of importance and power in 
Egypt, Tripoli, Tunis or Morocco; in Arabia, 
Turkey, Syria, Persia or India; while European 
notions in weapons, in adornments, in clothing 
and in metal -working, found their way through 
the slave-trade to the remotest recesses of 
Africa. It was in this way that American in- 
troductions like tobacco have spread in three 
hundred years — between 1600 and 1900 (for 
tobacco was scarcely introduced into Africa 
before the beginning of the seventeenth cen- 
tury) — all over the continent, tobacco being 
known practically to every tribe and race 
except the Hottentot and the Bushman (who 
used the earlier Indian narcotic, hemp), and 
some forest pygmies when Africa was finally 
laid bare at the beginning of the twentieth 
century. 

As a set-off against the damage done by the 
slave-trade, the Arabs greatly improved the 



THE MOSLEM ARABS IN AFRICA 151 

circumstances of negro life as they first found 
it. To them seems to be due the introduction 
of rice and of the sugar-cane from India. 
The cotton plant may also have been brought 
by them. They certainly spread its cultivation 
over all parts of Africa which they could reach, 
possibly bringing indigo with them at the same 
time. They may also have introduced hemp, 
which preceded tobacco as a narcotic (and a 
very unwholesome one). They spread the use 
of the horse : even if they did not introduce it 
into Negro Africa — which they probably did. 
They seem to have brought from India before 
and after the Islamic times the zebu type of 
humped ox, and introduced this into Somali- \ 
land and East Africa. \ 

Lastly, they conferred on fetish-ridden 
Africans, tortured in mind and body by some 
of the most hideous forms of religion ever 
invented, the comparative blessings of the 
Muhammadan faith, and with it they conveyed 
a wonderful feeling of self-respect, which was 
partly aided by a suitable and picturesque 
costume. Wherever the European races have 
been concerned Muhammadanism has ulti- 
mately resulted in an arrest of development, 
partly through its connection with the Turks. 
It has gone far to ruin the north of Africa and 
Egypt. Syria, Persia and Asia Minor have 
been reduced to a pitiable condition by a faith 
which was of little positive value, and inspired 
men to no high deeds in art or science. But to 
Negro Africa, and no doubt to parts of India 



152 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

and Malaysia, it came as a great blessing, 
raising up savages to a state, at any rate, of 
semi-civilization, making them god-fearing, 
self-respecting, temperate, courageous and 
picturesque. 



CHAPTER VIII 

PORTUGAL OPENS UP AFRICA 

In the eleventh century of the Christian 
era a new force appeared in Mediterranean 
waters which slightly affected the opening up 
of Africa. This was that wonderful people, 
the Northmen : the coastmen of Norway and 
Denmark, who did so much to colonize 
)and virilize England, Scotland and Ireland, 
Flanders and northern France, whence they 
obtained their current name of Normand 
(Norman), the French rendering of the Scan- 
dinavian Nordnisend. As early as the tenth 
century these sea-rovers were harassing the 
coasts of Morocco, and are spoken of in the 
Arabic chronicles of that country as Maju. 
Having become Christians at the close of the 
tenth century they took to making pilgrim- 
ages to Palestine and assisting Italian princes 
against the Saracens. By the middle of the 
eleventh century they had created a Norman 
state in southern Italy, and had conquered 
Sicily from the Saracens by 1090. In the 
twelfth century they also seized and held 



PORTUGAL OPENS UP AFRICA 153 

intermittently, places on the east coast of 
Tunis. When the Normans took possession 
of Sicily and southern Italy they did not 
despise the erudition or the art of their 
Saracen subjects. On the contrary, they dealt 
out even-handed justice to Muhammadan and 
Christian alike, and in this way acquired the 
liking of many Arabs, who were willing to 
instruct them in the lore of recently-explored 
Africa; and under Norman rule a great trade 
sprang up between southern Italy and Moorish 
Africa. 

Another depot of trade, for the interchange 
of European and African products in the 
period between the eleventh and fourteenth 
centuries, was the south of Moorish Spain, 
especially such ports as Malaga. Hither 
Arabs and Berbers brought the products of 
West Africa, especially spices and pepper. 
The most favoured of these condiments in 
European estimation, perhaps, was the seed 
of a handsome amarantaceous plant distantly 
allied to the banana, and known by the modern 
scientific name of Aframomum. Colloquially, 
these seeds were often called " Grains of Para- 
dise," and from a shortening of this term is 
derived the old trade name for Sierra Leone 
and Liberia : the Grain Coast. As this spice, 
during the period above referred to, was 
chiefly dispensed from Malaga it became 
known as Malagueta pepper. 

When the Norman power faded in the 
Mediterranean there grew up bold sea-rovers 



154 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

(often tinged, no doubt, with Norman blood) 
in the ports of the Balearic Islands, which 
had been wrested from the Moors by the 
Christian kingdom of Aragon ; and also on 
the Ligurian and Etruscan coasts — Genoa 
and Pisa. In the Adriatic the power of 
Venice had become a very potent factor in 
the development of the trade between Europe, 
Asia and Africa. But sea-rovers of Catalonia 
and the Balearic Islands, of Genoa, Pisa and 
other north-west Italian ports, began to 
penetrate into the open Atlantic Ocean ; 
where they encountered as rivals — not alto- 
gether friendly — descendants of the Norman 
settlers of northern France, and Flemings 
and Dutchmen ; likewise, no doubt, of mainly- 
Norman descent. Such adventurers as these 
discovered, or rediscovered, the Azores Archi- 
pelago, a thousand miles west of Portugal 
and almost half way across to America (it 
is quite possible, however, that this Archi- 
pelago had been visited by the Phoenicians). 
They also reached the Canary Islands and 
noted that they were inhabited by a tall, 
handsome race of white people — the Guanches, 
of whom, the men went nearly or quite naked. 
Genoans and Pisans began to enter into 
friendly relations with the civilized Berber 
dynasties of North Africa, especially on the 
coast of east Algeria or northern Tunis. 

The Venetians, on the other hand, taking 
advantage of the pacification which followed 
the withdrawal of the Crusaders from Syria, 



PORTUGAL OPENS UP AFRICA 155 

opened up friendly relations with the Mamluk 
sultans of Egypt and Syria, thus being 
enabled to stimulate and conduct an indirect 
trade with India and with East Africa. 
Through this trade they were enabled to pour 
the spices of the East into the markets of 
Central, Western and Northern Europe ; for 
the people of the Middle Ages and succeeding 
centuries, down to about one hundred and 
fifty years ago, had a passion for highly-spiced 
food, which to us at the present day would 
be nauseous, uneatable or indigestible. The 
Venetians sought by every means in their 
power to create a monopoly in the spice trade. 
They fought with Genoa and Pisa, and 
although they did not completely crush them, 
nevertheless, so enfeebled these republics as 
greatly to hamper their development of trade 
with North and West Africa, which was just 
beginning. 

But about this time a new maritime power 
was arising in the west of Europe : Portugal. 
This little kingdom had been founded by a 
bold German, a knight of Burgundian descent, 
who had taken service with the King of 
Castile in order to harass the Moors of Western 
Spain. Henry of Burgundy drove the Moors 
southwards across the Douro to the banks of 
the Tagus, and became the Count of Portus 
Calis (a small harbour at the mouth of the 
Douro, near Oporto, which was known as 
*' Portugal "). His successor, aided by a 
roving band of English crusaders, had cap- 



156 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

tured Lisbon from the. Moors, and finally, 
by the year 1250, had carried the Christian 
power to the southernmost limits of Portugal, 
the little coast province of Algarve, which in 
a slightly altered form, still bears its old 
Arabic name of Al-Gharb, the Province of 
the Setting Sun. 

From Southern Portugal the Moors were 
pursued into Morocco, and Portuguese and 
Castilians in alliance seized and held such 
points of vantage as Tangier and Septa 
(Ceuta). Prominent amongst the Portuguese 
warriors and leaders of thought and specu- 
lation, was Prince Henry, the second son 
of the Portuguese king, Joao I, and of 
his English queen, Philippa : daughter of 
that John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, 
who was one of the most prolific of English 
princes and was the ancestor of the present 
British dynasty, as well as figuring in the 
family tree of nearly all the monarchs of 
Europe. Prince Henry, afterwards surnamed 
the " Navigator," conversed with many intel- 
ligent Moors when Portuguese rule had been 
established over the northern extremity of 
Morocco. From them he heard wonderful 
stories of the wealth of Inner Africa: the 
gold of the Gold Coast, the abundance of 
spice and pepper in the tropical forests, the 
incredible numbers of elephants, and the 
handsome cotton cloths woven by industrious 
black people. It may be that Prince Henry, 
who was a man of wide learning and patient 



PORTUGAL OPENS UP AFRICA 157 

research, had also heard rumours of adven- 
turous sea journeys undertaken by the hardy 
seamen of Dieppe (Normandy), or of Majorca 
or North-west Italy, who — it is, believed — had 
not confined their explorations to the dis- 
covery of the Canaries, Madeira and the 
Azores, but had passed along the west coast 
of Africa till they had reached the great Gulf 
of Guinea. 

[It has since been maintained by students 
of French history that in the fourteenth 
century the mariners of Dieppe had visited 
the mouth of the Senegal, had established 
trading posts on the coasts of Liberia, and 
finally had reached the Gold Coast and built 
a fort at the place now called Elmina, deriving 
from these regions much gold and above all 
much ivory. There is no doubt that an 
ivory-carving industry arose at Dieppe about 
this period, and it seems strange that it should 
have done so, unless the trade of Dieppe was 
in touch with some ivory-producing region 
like West Africa.] 

But these adventures, if they ever took place, 
had come to an end in the first quarter of the 
fifteenth century when Prince Henry was 
inclined to renew them on behalf of the 
Portuguese. He caused ships to be fitted out 
and to direct their course southwards past the 
various headlands of Morocco. For several 
years the mariners were baffled by Atlantic 
storms and unable to get past Cape Bojador 
(a name which means the bulging, or jutting- 



158 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

out cape), but this obstacle was passed in the 
year 1434 by a bold mariner, Gil Eannes, who 
in the following year succeeded in reaching 
the inlet now known as the Rio de Oro, where 
was situated the little island of Heme, 
supposed to have been the Kerne trading depot 
of the Carthaginians : a place whence they 
maintained intercourse with what may have 
been a Fula people inhabiting the region 
between the Rio de Oro and the mouth of the 
Senegal. The Fulas had long been displaced 
by the Zenaga Moors, a mixture of Libyan and 
Arab tribes. The Portuguese adventurers 
seized some of these Moors to convey them to 
Portugal as slaves. Here they pleaded with 
Prince Henry for their freedom, stating that 
far away to the south beyond their own 
country was a land of black people whom it 
was not only lawful in their eyes to enslave, 
but who proved very docile and laborious 
servants. They said they had no gold in their 
own country, but what they derived in trade 
from the lands of the negroes. In short, they 
offered, if the Portuguese would take them 
back to their own land, to furnish guides or 
pilots which might show the Portuguese ships 
the way to the land of black people and of 
tropical rains. 

This was agreed to, and under this guidance 
the Portuguese in 1444 reached the mouth of 
the Senegal and did something to explore that 
river. Further explorations followed rapidly, 
sometimes undertaken by Venetian or Genoese 



PORTUGAL OPENS UP AFRICA 159 

captains in the service of Portugal, i?uch as 
Ca da Mosto and Uso di Mare. By the year 
1471 the Portuguese had at last reached the 
far-famed Gold Coast and proceeded ten years 
later to build a fort, which they called St. 
George of the Mine (Sao Jorge da Mina), at 
that same Elmina which is alleged to have 
been a stronghold of the Dieppe traders some 
fifty or sixty years earlier. 

By the year 1485 the Portuguese had got 
into touch with another important African 
kingdom, that of Benin. Benin had received 
its strange civilization from Yoruba, and 
Yoruba again from the Sudan — ^Hausaland 
and Bornu. A remarkable art of moulding, 
and perhaps casting, was already in existence 
when the Portuguese reached Benin in the 
latter half of the fifteenth century, but whether 
the Benin people already possessed bronze 
before they received it from the Portuguese is 
doubtful. But they were greedy for this 
alloy and probably from the Portuguese learnt 
the art of casting by a process known as " cire 
perdue," in which a mould of the object to be 
cast in bronze is first made in wax. The people 
of Benin were able to give to the Portuguese 
immense quantities of Malagueta pepper, 
tusks of ivory, and negro slaves, but their 
swampy country had no gold. 

The Portuguese passed along the Niger 
delta without realizing that it was the delta 
of the wonderful river they had dimly heard 
of in the interior of Senegambia. They dis- 



100 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

covered the Kamerun ^ Mountains and estuary, 
the island of Fernando P6 (then inhabited by 
a wild race of Bantu-speaking negroes in 
the most primitive condition of Palaeolithic 
culture), and reached the mouth of the Congo 
in 1482. They realized the importance of this 
great river, and a few years afterwards sent an 
expedition, which sailed and rowed up this 
stream to the highest point possible, below 
the impassable Falls of Yelala. Here, on 
high rocky cliffs, they inscribed the facts 
relating to this expedition, an inscription 
which was only rediscovered a few years ago, 
and which is a signal proof amongst many 
others that the Portugal of that period was a 
nation of heroes achieving with very small 
means things which would be barely within 
the power of the best-equipped European 
expeditions of the present day. 

Not content with thus getting access to the 
land which produced pepper and gold, the 
Portuguese with a boldness of conception that 
was really remarkable, dispatched more than 
one adventurous traveller such as Pedro de 
Covilham to find a way through Egypt to 
India by the Red Sea, and discover some means 
of cutting off the Venetian trade in spice with 
that vast country. Pedro de Covilham after 

^ It may be as well to state here that although for the 
sake of uniformity the official German spelling Kamerun 
has been adopted in this book^ the name is really a Portu- 
guese word, CamarOes, meaning prawns, owing to the 
abundance of prawns in the river estuaries. 



PORTUGAL OPENS UP AFRICA 161 

reaching India and visiting Arab East Africa 
had landed on his return journey up the Red 
Sea at Masawa and entered Abyssinia about the 
year 1489. Though detained here against his 
will, he sent back to his countrymen accounts 
of this remarkable Christian kingdom, which, 
together with distorted legends of Christian 
khans in Tartary, created the legend of Prester 
John. But the semi-imprisonment of Pedro 
de Covilham by the king of Abyssinia and the 
always-existing hostility of the Muhammadans 
on the Red Sea route to India, spurred on the 
Portuguese government and its adventurous 
subjects to continue their explorations of West 
Africa, and find a way round the southern end 
of that continent. Nevertheless, they did not 
neglect the gold possibilities of West Africa. 

Amongst other inspiring legends which were 
luring men on far adventures in that wonderful 
century — the fifteenth, the great century of 
the rebirth or renaissance — was the story of 
Timbuktu. Timbuktu is situated at the 
present day a few miles from the north bank 
of the Central Niger where that river reaches 
the most northern extension of its course. No 
doubt its site has been for ages a converging 
point of commerce between the Sahara and the 
Sudan, and probably arose as such on the 
actual banks of the Niger lake before that lake 
dwindled to a river with backwaters and 
isolated lakelets. As a civilized city, how- 
ever, it was founded by the Songhai merchants 
of Jenne, about 1150 a.d., on the site of an old 



162 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

Tuareg trading camp called Tombutu or 
Tinbuktu. Through its trading intercourse 
by way of the salt-mines of Tegazza with 
Morocco, Algeria and Southern Tunis, it 
became rapidly a city of great wealth, though 
its immediate surroundings produced little 
or nothing but camels and herds of sheep and 
goats. To Timbuktu, however, by way of the 
Niger and its tributaries and by overland 
routes, came the gold of Ashanti and the gold 
of Bambarra; the salt of the Western Sahara 
Desert, and vast numbers of , negro slaves, 
besides the cotton goods of the Sudan. From 
Roman or from Muslim Egypt the cultivation 
of the cotton plant and the use of the loom for 
weaving its thread had spread right across the 
Northern Sudan to the Upper Niger, as well as 
the art of producing a dye from indigo which 
tinted this cotton cloth a rich dark-blue. 
Long before the weaving of cotton was estab- 
hshed as a British industry. West and West 
Central Africa were supplying much of the 
Muhammadan world with strong cotton 
cloths. 

Under the stimulus of the Arab and Songhai 
religious and commercial propaganda and the 
rule or overlordships of the Songhai kings, 
not only had Timbuktu and Jenne (at the 
confluence of the Niger and the Bani) risen into 
prominence in Western Africa, but Gao or 
Gago, the original Songhai capital on the 
Central Niger; Kano, in the very heart of the 
Sudan ; Birni, the great city of Bornu ; 



PORTUGAL OPENS UP AFRICA 163 

Zinder, Katsena, Hausa and Zaria in Hausa- 
landj had become even greater centres of 
commerce and population. In fact, about 
the time the Portuguese were discovering 
for Europe the coast -Hne of West Africa, the 
whole Sudan from the Upper Senegal and 
Upper Gambia on the west to Darfur and the 
confines of Nubia on the east, was becoming 
a region of civilization. It possessed its own 
distinctive architecture, that introduced 
originally by the Songhai people and now 
more associated with the Fula — an archi- 
tecture obviously derived from an imitation 
of the style of ancient Egypt (but later 
influenced by the Saracenic art of North 
Africa) : it had acquired the horse likewise 
from Egypt, and. had developed fine breeds 
of that animal ; it possessed flocks of domestic 
donkeys and great herds of cattle, sheep and 
goats, the leather of these animals being cured 
and dressed with a peculiar art, famous to 
this day. There were busy forges at work 
turning out manufactures of iron. Tin had 
been discovered in Nigeria and was being 
combined with native copper to make bronze. 
Brass — which is a compound of copper and 
zinc — was being imported from Egypt and 
the Mediterranean. Life and property in 
the regions outside the great forests were 
fairly secure. Agriculture was industriously 
pursued, and except for occasional famines 
caused by drought, locusts or floods, the 
Western and Central Sudan was a land of 

F2 



164 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

bounteous plenty. In fact, there were some 
regions in which hunger could not exist 
because of the abundance of wild edible 
products. 

So that the Portuguese were told no lies 
by eager interpreters when they were led to 
believe in the existence of populous, wealthy 
and civilized cities in the heart of Africa. 
The first object of their search was naturally 
Timbuktu, with which they often confounded 
the still more remarkable brick-built city of 
Jenne, or " Guine," which is to-day one of the 
wonders of Africa. According to somewhat 
vague records, a Portuguese expedition set out 
about the year 1470 from the Senegal river, 
of which two envoys are said to have got as 
far as Jenne; while some years later another 
expedition landed at Cape Palmas in Southern 
Liberia and marched inland till they reached 
the Mandingo countries of the Upper Niger. 
Again, from the Gold Coast the Portuguese 
despatched expeditions towards the same 
region, which got no farther than the country 
of Mosi or Moshi (a powerful negro kingdom, 
early Muhammadanized), but this was already 
a considerable feat, and was not repeated by 
European explorers for about four hundred 
years. 

By 1488 a great Portuguese navigator, 
Bartolomeu Diaz, had penetrated as far 
south as the Cape of Good Hope, and had 
just managed to round that promontory to 
Algoa Bay before storms compelled him to 



PORTUGAL OPENS UP AFRICA 165 

return. Nine years later, Vasco da Gama, 
with an expedition of four ships, not only 
rounded the Cape — whose name King John II 
of Portugal had already changed from the 
Cape of Storms to the " Cape of Good Hope " 
— but sailed eagerly and prosperously along 
the coast of Natal into the smoother waters 
of the Mozambique Channel. Calling at 
Sofala, he found himself in touch with 
" Moors " — the East African traders who came 
thither from Southern and Eastern Arabia. 
With these Arabs on the outward and home- 
ward journeys, he partly warred and partly 
compromised or made friends. He heard from 
them of the gold in the river valleys of the 
interior, the wonderful stone cities, and the 
powerful negro empire of Monomotapa. Con- 
tinuing northwards with Arab pilots he visited 
Zanzibar, Mombasa and Malindi. At this last 
place he obtained a pilot who showed him how 
to cross the Indian Ocean with the monsoon 
wind, and thus he arrived at Calicut on the 
Malabar coast of India, a very remarkable 
event in the history of man. On his return 
journey from India, Vasco da Gama touched 
at the island of Mozambique and visited 
Quehmane near the mouth of the Zambezi. 
Between 1505 and 1508 Portuguese captains 
of fleets captured from the Arabs Sofala, 
Quelimane, Sena (on the Lower Zambezi), 
Mozambique, Kilwa, Zanzibar, Mombasa, 
Malindi, Lamu, and Magdishu — all on the 
East African coast — and, in addition, Aden, 



166 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

Sokotra and the island of Ormuz (in the 
Persian Gulf). 

In the subsequent development of a Portu- 
guese empire over Africa, a fatal blunder was 
made. The Portuguese neglected to occupy 
the Cape of Good Hope or any other strong- 
hold on the southern extremity of West Africa. 
They had discovered in the Southern Atlantic 
the islands of Ascension and St. Helena, 
which on direct voyages to the Cape of Good 
Hope might have been useful calling-places 
for water and vegetables; but to any power 
that aspired, as did the Portuguese, to occupy 
and rule East Africa and India from the west 
of Europe and by means of the Cape route, 
it was an oversight difficult to understand 
that prevented their garrisoning the neces- 
sary places of call between St. Helena Bay 
and Algoa Bay at the southern extremity of 
Africa. It might have been difficult to es- 
tablish such a stronghold at any point on the 
coast of Natal (even if there had been a 
harbour there, which there was not) because 
of the numerous and warlike Bantu tribes in 
the vicinity. But the natives of the region 
about the Cape of Good Hope were only 
Hottentots and Bushmen, quite unable to 
resist or to eject a force of determined 
Europeans. 

For three-quarters of the sixteenth century 
Portugal had it all her own way in Africa. 
She had even established a sort of empire 
over Northern Morocco, and by treaty with 



PORTUGAL OPENS UP AFRICA 167 

Spain (that of Tordesillas in 1498) her sphere 
of influence in North-western Africa was 
recognized as commencing on the East Morocco 
coast at Velez de la Gomera. 

Spain by the beginning of the sixteenth 
century had seized and held many points 
of vantage along the Mediterranean coast of 
North Africa between Melilla on the west and 
Sfax on the east. In Tunisia Spain played a 
very important part between 1535 and 1574. 
But the rise in Turkish power in the Mediter- 
ranean acting through Turkish corsairs or 
pirates drove the Spaniards out of all these 
acquisitions in North Africa with the ex- 
ception of Oran and Melilla. Spain, how- 
ever, had acquired the archipelago of the 
Canary Islands by 1279, and never lost this 
valuable possession. 

The Turks having seized Egypt and gar- 
risoned the Red Sea coast as far south as 
Masawa, attempted to interfere with the 
Portuguese on the route to India, but they 
were signally defeated and prevented from 
making any extension of their power towards 
East Africa. About 1532 the Portuguese 
interfered romantically in the affairs of 
Abyssinia, sending an army of four hundred 
horsemen and artillery to assist the king of 
Abyssinia in resisting the attacks of the 
Muhammadan Somalis and Arabs from Aden. 
[This expedition will be described in Chapter 
XIII.] It led to the establishment of 
Portuguese Roman Catholic missionaries in 



168 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

Abyssinia, and to the discovery of the source 
of the Blue Nile, of the leading features in 
Abyssinian geography, and of many strange 
African mammals and birds till then un- 
known, such as the Zebra and the Hornbill. 
The facts which were thus revealed were, 
however, much exaggerated by the map- 
makers of Portugal and Italy, and actually 
prevented for centuries a right appreciation 
of the geography of Africa, for Abyssinian 
names, lakes, mountains and rivers were 
pushed southwards on the map of Africa till 
they entered the region of the Zambezi. 

In this last region — Zambezia — the Portu- 
guese by the beginning of the second half of 
the sixteenth century had achieved great 
explorations. They had explored the river 
Zambezi more or less to the rapids of the 
Lupata gorge and had left missionaries behind 
to pursue geographical investigations as well 
as convert the negroes to Christianity. But 
the tsetse-fly wrecked the principal gold- 
seeking expeditions under Barreto (1560). 
Malarial fever carried off many of the Portu- 
guese, and the missionaries left behind were 
murdered by native chiefs, who did not like 
the idea of the Portuguese taking possession 
of the country. The Portuguese merely re- 
tained, on the south-east coast of Africa, Sofala 
and the Bazaruto Islands, and did not occupy 
Delagoa Bay till the eighteenth century. 

On the west coast of Africa they held the 
little island afterwards called Goree at Dakar, 



PORTUGAL OPENS UP AFRICA 169 

in Senegal, and one or two trading posts be- 
tween the Senegal river and Cape Blanco. 
They had trading stations along the lower 
part of the Gambia river and on the innumer- 
able rivers between the Gambia and Sierra 
Leone. The Ivory Coast they, and all suc- 
ceeding adventurers down to the close of the 
nineteenth century, left alone, because of the 
ferocity of the cannibal negroes and the abso- 
lute lack of any harbour or shelter; but the 
Portuguese were strongly established at El- 
mina on the Gold Coast, at Ajuda or Hwida 
on the coast of Dahome, and they had trading 
stations at Lagos, Old Calabar, and the 
Cameroons river. They had early annexed 
the islands of Fernando P6, Sao Thome, and 
Principe, in the Gulf of Guinea, and in 1492 
they had entered into an alliance with the 
powerful king of the Lower Congo. 

The kingdom of Kongo, like so many of 
these negro states in Africa, had been founded 
several centuries before the arrival of the 
Portuguese by a hunter-adventurer who came 
amongst the Palaeolithic savages of this region 
armed with weapons of iron and with great 
renown as a hunter of elephants and other big 
game. The people of this region, when the 
Portuguese first came amongst them at the 
close of the fifteenth century, were, in fact, 
impregnated with what may be called the 
civilization of Bushongo. They were workers 
of metal, weavers of grass-cloth or of cloth 
made of palm-fibre, they made beautiful 



170 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA. 

pottery by hand, they carved ivory and wood, 
and had an elaborate religion, a hierarchy of 
nobles and a sovereign regarded as semi- 
sacred. 

This early type of African civilization 
specially characteristic of Benin, Yoruba, 
and Bushongo, by the close of the fifteenth 
century had probably affected much of the 
interior of West and Central Africa, stopping 
short, however, of regions of dense forest 
where the people still lived under , very 
primitive and barbarous conditions. Such 
backward regions were what is now called 
Portuguese Guinea between the Gambia and 
Sierra Leone; Liberia and the Ivory Coast, 
the main delta of the Niger, the coast district 
of the Kamerun, and the gorilla country be- 
tween the Kamerun on the north and Luango 
on the south. But this " Bushongo " type of 
civilization had influenced much of Southern 
Nigeria, Northern Kamerun, Western Congo- 
land and the interior of Northern Angola. It 
also ascended the main stream of the Congo 
and its affluents, the Mubangi and Kasai; and 
reached the shores of the great lakes — Vic- 
toria Nyanza, Tanganyika and Nyasa, and the 
Zambezian empire of Monomotapa. 

There was in addition, when the Portuguese 
began to open up Africa, the already described 
Songhai and Bornu type of civilization in the 
Sudan which extended from Upper Nubia and 
the Blue Nile to the mouth of the Senegal, 
a civilization distinctly higher and more 



PORTUGAL OPENS UP AFRICA 171 

infused with European ideas than that of 
Benin and South Central Africa. But else- 
where the condition of the negro inhabitants 
of fifteenth-century Africa was one of almost 
complete savagery. 

But in the people of the Lower Congo the 
Portuguese found a race eager and willing to 
receive some measure of European civilization. 
They became rapidly, though superficially, 
converted to Christianity. They adopted 
European names and titles ; petty chiefs styled 
themselves counts; stronger chiefs marquises; 
males of the chief's family became dukes or 
princes ; and native women of prominence and 
possessions were correspondingly ennobled. 
But the Portuguese were never much more 
at this period than the powerful allies of the 
Congo kingdom. Directly they attempted to 
subjugate it they met with a stubborn and suc- 
cessful resistance. Consequently they turned 
their efforts more (after 1597) towards found- 
ing a colony in Angola. In Northern Angola 
the people were nearly allied in race and 
language to those of the Lower Congo, but 
were not so civilized, united or powerful. In 
spite of several revolts and much native resist- 
ance the Portuguese established themselves 
firmly in Angola and on the river Kwanza by 
the close of the sixteenth century. 

But before this date had commenced a 
decline and disintegration of the Portuguese 
power in Africa and elsewhere. No doubt 
Portugal in styling her monarch King of 



172 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

Portugal and of the Two Lands of the Setting 
Sun on this side and on that side of the sea 
in Africa, Lord of Guinea and of the conquest 
and navigation of Ethiopia, Arabia, Persia 
and India, had attempted to saddle a small 
country of some two millions of people with 
an impossible empire, especially as the vast 
country of Brazil in the New World was be- 
coming the most prominent of the Portuguese 
possessions beyond the seas. Yet so far as 
Portugal itself was constituted in regard to 
climate, and even area (it is about thirty-six 
thousand square miles), there is no reason why 
it might not have achieved proportionately 
as much as England has done, but for some 
inherent weakness of race and the appalling 
blow which fell on the country by the defeat 
and death of the King Sebastian in Morocco 
on the fatal field of Kasr-al-Kabir in the year 
1578. This defeat, which led subsequently 
to the founding of the Sharifian Empire of 
Morocco — now tottering to its fall — cost 
Portugal not only her young king, who died 
childless, but many of her leading nobles, 
no doubt of Gothic or Burgundian descent. 
King Sebastian was succeeded for two years 
by his uncle, a cardinal of the Roman Church, 
and when this last king of the house of Avis 
died in 1580, the next legitimate heir to the 
throne was the king of Spain, Philip II. 

After the fatal battle of Kasr-al-Kabir, the 
Portuguese lost all their possessions in Morocco 
except one or two points on the Atlantic coast. 



PORTUGAL OPENS UP AFRICA 173 

and Tangier and Ceuta.^ But Portuguese 
prestige had received a fatal blow. Spain, 
though she had maintained the administration 
of Portugal intact as a separate country from 
the rest of the Peninsula, and similarly carried 
on the work of the Portuguese colonies mainly 
by Portuguese administrators, nevertheless in 
the eyes of the world at large became iden- 
tified with the Portuguese Empire and respon- 
sible for it. Hitherto the English, French 
and Dutch had been embarrassed in their 
adventures by the obstacles Portugal placed 
in their way, and at the same time their un- 
willingness to quarrel with the court of Lisbon 
because of their greater dislike of the court 
of Madrid. But as soon as the Spanish and 
Portuguese crowns were fused in the person 
of Philip II. in 1580, then these Northern 
nations knew no pity in their attacks on 
Portuguese possessions. The British and 
Dutch were most eager to trade with the 
west coast of Africa, and the Portuguese had 
constantly prevented their doing so. But in 
1621 the Dutch seized the Portuguese foot- 
holds of Arguin and Goree on the Senegal 
coast, and in 1637 captured the Portuguese 
fort of Sao Jorge at Elmina on the Gold Coast. 
The Dutch likewise took the place of the 
Portuguese as the claimants or owners of 
St. Helena, Mauritius and Bourbon, on the 

^ Ceuta was retained by Spain when tlie Portuguese 
regained their independence in 1640. Tangier was given 
to England in 1662. 



174 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

coasts of Madagaskar, and also attempted, 
with partial success, to turn them out of the 
Kongo kingdom of Angola and of Mozam- 
bique. The French also commenced trading 
on the Senegal river, and began to frequent 
Madagaskar and the Mascarene Islands. But 
the Dutch were the deadliest enemies of the 
Portuguese in Africa and elsewhere, because 
of their long prolonged war of independence 
against Spain. 

Portugal recovered her independence in 
1640, and soon afterwards developed con- 
siderable energy not only in opening up 
Brazil, but in extending her possessions in 
Angola and Mozambique. The Arabs of 
Maskat and of Southern Arabia had retaken 
their ancient possessions and footholds along 
the Somali and Zanzibar coasts, including 
the island of Zanzibar; but the Portuguese 
continued to hold Mombasa fitfully during 
the early part of the eighteenth century. 
Finally, about 1752, some sort of arrange- 
ment was come to with the Maskat Arabs. 
Portugal withdrew from all possessions north 
of the Ruvuma river, and contented herself 
with Mozambique and Zambezia. 

In the eighteenth century the Dutch set- 
tlements in South Africa began to attract 
the attention and envy of Europe, and the 
Portuguese, no doubt prompted by this and 
by the desire of other European powers to 
found settlements in South Africa, attempted 
in a rather feeble way to occupy Delagoa Bay. 



PORTUGAL OPENS UP AFRICA 175 

On the west coast of Africa the colony of 
Angola was extended southwards to Mossa- 
medes, and some kind of claim was set up to 
influence over the coast as far as Cape Frio. 
During the eighteenth century much inter- 
course grew up between the Portuguese and 
the powerful Bantu kingdoms of the southern 
basin of the Congo, generally grouped under 
the title of the Empire of Lunda. Portuguese 
civilization, costumes, arms, spread inland 
across the Kwango river to Southern Congo- 
land. From Mozambique, and nostly from 
Tete on the Zambezi, it reached north as far 
as Lake Mweru. Portuguese slave-traders, 
generally half-castes, at length pushed their 
journeys from the west eastwards, and from 
the east north-westwards, until they had 
crossed from Angola to Mozambique and 
vice versa. 

But a new shadow fell across the Portuguese 
power when it seemed possible that another 
Brazil was being founded in Africa. Dr. 
Lacerda, a Brazilian scientific explorer whom 
the Portuguese government had sent out to 
Zambezia to conduct an expedition which 
might open up communications between that 
possession and Angola, heard Just as he was 
preparing to start on his journey that a British 
force had occupied Capetown. He uttered 
the remarkable prediction that this event 
might lead to the establishment of British 
rule from Cape Colony to Egypt. 

The general results of the Portuguese dis- 



176 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

covery of the west and east coasts of Africa 
was very noteworthy in so far as they affected 
the future condition of the negro races. The 
Portuguese found the Sudan as it was after 
the Arabs, the Songhai, the Copts, the Nu- 
bians and the Libj^^ans had brought to it the 
achievements of the Middle Ages : namely, 
enjoying an Eastern type of civilization 
not without its comforts, learning and 
even luxuries. But they also found the 
densely forested regions of the West African 
coast-belt, the western basin of the Congo, 
and the undiscovered parts of South and 
South-east Africa in a state of comparative 
or complete savagery, and sometimes in a 
condition of intermittent famine. Savage, 
naked, negro Africa at the time of the Portu- 
guese discoveries during the fifteenth and 
sixteenth centuries, had little more than 
goats, sheep and dogs and fowls in the way of 
domestic animals; and few cultivated vege- 
table products beyond yams, bananas, gourds, 
pumpkins, and (where Arab civilization had 
reached them indirectly) the sorghum, eleusine 
and pennisetum cereals, and beans and peas. 
In much of the forest regions of Central Africa 
even these food products were lacking; and the 
Portuguese had not meddled with West Africa 
for much more than a century before they 
realized how every few years food-famines 
swept over the country bringing disaster in 
their train and destroying large numbers of 
the inhabitants. 



PORTUGAL OPENS UP AFRICA 177 

During the sixteenth and seventeenth cen- 
turies they made haste to introduce into 
West and East Africa cultivated plants from 
Brazil which might give the negro a more 
permanent food supply. Thus to them, and 
to them alone, is due the introduction of the 
pineapple, which now grows wild over much 
of the Congo Basin and the West African wood- 
lands. They introduced tobacco, the useful 
manioc or arrowroot, ground-nuts (Arachis), 
sweet potatoes, maize, oranges, limes, sugar- 
cane, red pepper, tomatoes, onions, the guava, 
the papaw tree, perhaps the coco-nut ; the pig, 
several breeds of cattle, dogs, cats and horses, 
the Muscovy duck (a common domestic bird 
now in Negro Africa), the turkey (which has 
taken root on the eastern Gold Coast), and 
many utensils, weapons, musical instruments, 
and industries, which it would be tedious to 
enumerate. They also brought wheat to the 
Zambezi basin, and often co-operated with 
the Arabs in spreading the cultivation of 
rice. Though, like the Dutch and later the 
Spaniards, British, French and Danes, they 
established the oversea slave-trade, on the 
whole the verdict of history will be that 
they contributed materially to the ultimate 
welfare of the negro inhabitants of Africa. 

One indirect effect of the Portuguese attempt 
to rule northern Morocco was that the Sharifs 
of Tafilalt, who had chiefly come to power 
through their share in the defeating the 
Portuguese at the battle of Kasr-al-Kabir, 



178 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

acquired from their expulsion of the Portuguese 
large quantities of guns, cannon and ammu- 
nition. The new Sharifian dynasty of Morocco 
also enlisted Spanish Moors (Rumis), and 
armed with the new weapon — gunpowder — 
they determined to effect the conquest of the 
Nigerian Sudan, not only in order to secure the 
salt-mines of the western Sahara, but to gain 
access to a country which produced black 
slaves in abundance — slaves that might easily 
be turned into bold and faithful warriors, and 
so provide the supreme ruler of Morocco with 
a standing army. Accordingly, in 1590 the 
then sultan of Morocco, Abu'l Abbas-al- 
Mansur, dispatched his general, Juder Basha, 
with an army of Spanish Moors and negroes to 
attack the Songhai Empire on the Upper 
Niger. The expedition was completely suc- 
cessful. Timbuktu was captured in 1591 and 
the Songhai Empire soon afterwards came to 
an end. The result of this and succeeding 
expeditions was that the sultan of Morocco 
ruled southwards to the town of Jenne and his 
empire covered a good deal of the Upper 
Niger. He or his vicero3^s in the Sudan even 
conceived the idea of adding Hausaland to his 
dominions, but were probably restrained by 
the growing power of Bornu. But this Moorish 
rule of the Upper Niger carried a bastard 
European civilization still farther into Negro 
Africa; Moorish architecture, Moorish art in 
metal -work and in leather, Moorish cookery 
and Moorish ideas of history and religion 



THE DUTCH IN AFRICA 179 

penetrated all through Nigeria and permeated 
much of West Africa to the north of the forest 
zone. 



CHAPTER IX 

THE DUTCH IN AFRICA 

It has been already shown in the last chap- 
ter how Holland, while warring with Spain 
by sea as well as on land, replaced the Portu- 
guese as the principal nation trading with 
West Africa. By 1637 they had acquired, 
through purchase from the natives or by the 
exercise of force, the islet of Arguin off Cape 
Blanco; Rufisque, Goree, Joal and Portendal 
between the Senegal and the Gambia; and 
Fort Nassau and Elmina on the Gold Coast. 
A little later they attempted vainly to replace 
the Portuguese in Congoland, and seized and 
held a portion of Angola, besides occupying 
Mozambique for a few years, and establishing 
trading settlements on the coast of Madagaskar. 
They also occupied the island of Mauritius 
during the seventeenth century, and exter- 
minated the Dodo in that island as they are 
now-a-days exterminating the Birds of Para- 
dise in New Guinea. 

At different periods in the early part of the 
seventeenth century the Dutch consolidated 
their sea-going ventures into two great char- 
tered companies, one of the West Indies and 



180 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

the other of the East Indies. The West 
India Company ruled all the settlements on 
the west coast of Africa, in the East Indies, 
and on the coast of South America. The 
East India Company was granted a monopoly 
of trade from the Pacific coast of South America 
across the Indian Ocean to the Cape of Good 
Hope, and had its headquarters with a 
governor-general and consul at Batavia on 
the island of Java, a place, however, which 
was then called Jacatra. 

It was not at first intended to establish 
anything like a colony in South Africa : the 
ships eastward bound called at St. Helena 
(which the Dutch had occupied from 1645 to 
1651), and, if necessary, at Table Bay, where 
they maintained friendly relations with the 
Hottentots. But in 1648 a Dutch ship was 
wrecked at Table Bay, and the crew having 
landed lived there for five months, until they 
were picked up by other Dutch ships. During 
this period they sowed and reaped wheat, and 
obtained plenty of beef and mutton from the 
Hottentots. On their return they gave such 
a favourable report of the Cape Peninsula 
that the Dutch East India Company decided 
to take possession of Table Bay, and sent out 
an expedition under Jan van Riebeek, a ship's 
surgeon, who was already acquainted with 
South Africa. The three ships of Van 
Riebeek' s expedition reached Table Bay on 
the 6th of April, 1652, exactly 16j years after 
Bartolomeu Diaz had sighted the Cape of Good 



THE DUTCH IN AFRICA 181 

Hope. Seven years afterwards war broke 
out with the Hottentots. The Dutch settlers 
easily defeated them and then bought from 
them a small strip of coast, which gave them 
the whole of the Cape of Good Hope Peninsula. 
This action was necessary in view of the 
attention which France was beginning to 
pay to the neighbouring Saldanha Bay with 
the idea of establishing a footing in that 
harbour. 

After about 1680 no attempts were made to 
interfere with the Dutch settlements in South 
Africa. And this venture might have grown 
into a splendid colony for Holland — another 
Brazil — but for the stupidity and shortsighted- 
ness of the officials who managed the Dutch 
East India Company. The government of 
the Cape of Good Hope was really carried 
on simultaneously by a chamber of seventeen 
directors at Amsterdam, by deputies at 
Batavia, and by a commandant at the Cape 
who was alternately under the orders of 
Amsterdam and Batavia, but who might 
further be overruled by any officer of superior 
rank who visited the Cape of Good Hope. The 
restrictions imposed on the colonists were so 
vexatious as greatly to hamper any extensive 
colonization of South Africa, for the settlers 
in Cape Colony were practically slaves to 
the Chartered Company. Yet as the white 
immigration was comparatively slow under 
these conditions, it was necessary to find real 
slaves who would till the soil under the orders 



182 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

of the white colonists, and for this purpose 
the Dutch soon began to import slaves from 
Madagaskar, the Gold Coast and Mozambique, 
and also from the Malay Archipelago. Thus 
there is at the present day, as the descendants 
of these slaves, a considerable population of 
" Cape boys " (a mixture of Hottentots, 
Kafir, Fanti, Makua, Malagasy and whites), 
and Malays who are Muhammadans, and who 
from their intelligence and industry are 
becoming a very recognizable factor in the 
future of Cape Colony. 

When the colony had been established for 
thirty years it only contained 502 adult Dutch 
and Flemish settlers, besides 162 young 
children. But in 1689 nearly 200 French 
immigrants were landed at Capetown and 
settled in the mining country behind. They 
were homeless Huguenots whom the insensate 
policy of Louis XIV had expelled from France 
in 1685, to the immense enrichment of Eng- 
land, Ireland, Holland, the United States, 
Germany and South Africa. Already the East 
India Company had introduced the cultiva- 
tion of wheat and the vine, had sown acorns 
to produce oak trees, and brought pines to 
produce shady, aromatic forests along the 
lower slopes of Table Mountain. The French 
settlers taught the Cape Dutch amongst whom 
they lived, improved methods of growing corn 
and wine and more scientific agriculture. 

By the end of the seventeenth century the 
South African coast had been more ^or less 



THE DUTCH IN AFRICA 183 

explored from Little Namakwaland to Zulu- 
land, and an attempt had been made to 
purchase from the Kafirs the Bay of Natal. 
As early as 1688 (before the arrival of the 
French) Cape wine had been exported to 
Ceylon, and Cape wheat earlier still to the 
Dutch Indies. 

But the Dutch, while they introduced many 
things that were of benefit to the natives, 
brought to them the accursed distilled alcohol 
and the diseases of the civilized world. Small- 
pox exterminated nearly half of the popula- 
tion of the Hottentots in 1713, syphilis had 
also been introduced, and extended its ravages 
far and wide amongst the native population, 
many of whom also died from the effects of 
alcohol. These causes certainly prevented 
any rising of the Hottentot against the Dutch 
rule, and they had become almost by their 
own consent serfs to the Dutch settlers. A 
considerable half-breed population sprang 
up, the children of Dutchmen, Huguenots and 
Hottentots : in fact, during the end of the 
nineteenth century whole tribes of these half- 
castes came into existence, termed Bastards 
by the Dutch, and sometimes known by the 
Hottehtot term of Grikwa. Not a few of 
the Hottentots that we hear of in later times 
as fighting against the Germans in South- 
west Africa or warring with the Bantu 
Herero are of mixed White and Hottentot 
bloody descendants of people who migrated 
northwards from Cape Colony. 



184 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

By the beginning of the eighteenth century- 
Dutchmen had crossed the mountains im- 
mediately behind the projection of the Cape 
of Good Hope, and the boundaries of the 
Colony had been carried on the north, west 
and east to the Berg river, the Zwarten- 
bergen Mountains and the Gamtoos river. 
A few years later the Olifants river (so named 
because the first explorers met with hundreds 
of elephants in the vicinity) became the 
northern limit. To the eastward the colony 
during the eighteenth century gradually crept 
up to the shores of the Great Fish river, and 
by 1785 the district of Graaf Reinet had been 
formed. The lower course of the Orange 
River was discovered in 1760 and was traced 
to its mouth in 1779 by Captain Gordon, 
a Scotchman in the service of the Dutch 
Company, but the northern boundary of 
the Dutch colony of the Cape of Good Hope 
did not reach much beyond the second 
great range of South African mountains, the 
Sneeubergen. 

The Dutch made no further attempt to 
occupy the Bay of Natal after their abortive 
attempt at purchase in 1689 (when the ship 
containing the purchase deed was lost), but 
after abandoning Mauritius they sent in 1720 
an expedition to occupy Delagoa Bay. Here 
they built a fort called Lyd Zaamhaid, and 
even sent explorers in the direction of the 
Zambezi, who purchased gold-dust from the 
natives. But the loss they sustained at 



THE DUTCH IN AFRICA 185 

Delagoa Bay and on these expeditions from 
malarial fever was so great that the whole 
enterprise was abandoned in 1730. 

In 1770 the total Em^opean population in 
Dutch South Africa, mainly of Dutch descent 
(with not quite a thousand descendants of the 
original French Huguenots), was nearly ten 
thousand in number, of whom eight thousand 
were free colonists, and the remainder the ser- 
vants or employSs of the Company. There had 
been one or two strong, sensible, upright gover- 
nors, such as Tulbagh (who ruled without re- 
proach and with great ability from 1751 to 
1771, and who encouraged and directed numer- 
ous geographical explorations), and men like 
these endeavoured, as far as they were able, to 
mitigate the restrictions and taxes imposed 
on settlers by the administration of the Dutch 
Company. But the strangling policy which 
the latter favoured made the colony a poor 
one, and the Company, so far as its Cape 
administration was concerned, practically 
went bankrupt about the time that Governor 
Tulbagh retired. In 1779 the Company was 
more closely associated with the government 
of the United Provinces of Holland, and the 
head of the state (Stadhouder) was appointed 
perpetual chief director of the Company. 
This intervention of the state in the Char- 
tered Company's affairs led in South Africa, 
as in Guiana and the West Indies, to a 
great improvement of conditions amongst the 
settlers. 



186 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

In 1778 the Dutch colonists came into 
direct contact with the powerful Kafir tribes 
on the Great Fish river. In that year it was 
agreed by the Dutch governor of the Cape 
that this stream should be the boundary 
between the Dutch and the Kafirs. But two 
years afterwards the Kafirs commenced raid- 
ing the Dutch settlers, and in 1781 went to 
war with the Dutch forces and were beaten 
disastrously, being driven back to the Kei 
river, which had been in the former Kafir 
boundary as against the Hottentots. Yet 
in 1789 they invaded Cape Colony in force, 
and the Dutch power being scarcely strong 
enough to resist them, agreed to a compromise 
by which they were allowed to settle west- 
wards of the Great Fish river. 

From about this time the Dutch East India 
Company was becoming disheartened in regard 
to South Africa. They were aware that a 
great war was threatening once more to con- 
vulse Europe, and that in that war England 
and France would be on different sides and 
England would certainly make this the 
excuse to seize the Cape of Good Hope. 
Moreover, from a company point of view the 
Cape was not a profitable enterprise, and the 
East India Company was practically bankrupt. 
In 1791, when the European population of 
Cape Colony numbered 14,600 persons owning 
17,000 slaves, the Dutch government at home 
recalled the Company's governor and sent 
out two commissioners to represent the States- 



THE DUTCH IN AFRICA 187 

General, but the burghers, or Boers,^ of the 
interior districts chose this moment to rise 
against the oppressive rule of the Company 
and establish an independent republic of 
their own. Therefore, affairs in South Africa 
were in a state of chaos so far as this con- 
dition could exist amongst sober-sided, quiet, 
resolute people, determined under all con- 
ditions to show a united face to the watching 
Kafirs. 

The importance of Capetown as a half-way 
station on the way to India became apparent 
to the British and French by the middle of 
the eighteenth century. Their vessels in any 
ease were compelled to put in here for fresh 
water and fresh provisions. English and 
Scottish explorers took service under the 
Dutch Company ; French and Swedish 
naturalists wrote descriptions of the strange 
fauna and flora of the Cape. It became in- 
creasingly clear that this portion of the world 
would be seized by either France or England, 
whichever could get the first opportunity. 
Holland was much allied with France in 
the last half of the eighteenth century, and 
when she became included in the war against 
Great Britain which commenced with the 
rebellion of the American colonies, the British 
took advantage of this and of the frequent 
calling of French ships of war at Capetown to 

^ This word, meaning farmer, first comes into use about 
this time to express the Europeans settled on the land, and 
quite apart from the Company's oflScials and traders. 



188 THE OPENING UP OF AFMCA 

send out an expeditionary force and seize this 
Dutch possession (1781). But the attempt 
failed owing to a great naval defeat inflicted 
on the British by the French Admiral Suffren. 
However, in 1795, on the strength of s.n 
authorization granted by the Prince of Orange, 
Capetown was garrisoned by a British force ; 
and, although the colony was surrendered to 
Holland by the Peace of Amiens in 1802, 
possession of it was resumed on a permanent 
basis by Great Britain in 1806. From that 
time onwards the flag of the Netherlands 
ceased to fly in South Africa, though the 
Dutch element in that region of the continent 
has gone on increasing and multiplying until 
at the present day it is of equal numerical 
value with the British. 

The after-history of the Dutch-speaking 
colonists of South Africa cannot be related in 
detail here. But as pioneers they profoundly 
affected the development and opening up of 
South Africa. Large numbers of them, quar- 
relling with British rule, left Cape Colony in 
the 'thirties and 'forties of the nineteenth 
century and crossed the Orange and Vaal 
rivers into the unexplored regions inhabited 
by Bechuana tribes and raided by the newly 
arisen Zulu conquerors. The Boers — one 
against a hundred — broke the power of the 
Zulu hordes and created the present states 
of Natal, Orangia and the Transvaal. The 
influence of their Dutch dialect, their customs, 
dresSa mode of travel, and methods of hunting 



THE DUTCH IN AFRICA 189 

and making war extended northwards to the 
Kunene and the Zambezi. The Boers also 
commenced the destruction of the vast herds 
of game in South Africa which was completed 
by men of British nationality : both peoples 
being aided in all this pioneering work, good 
and bad, by many German settlers and adven- 
turers. In fact, in the opening up of South 
Africa, Germans, under the British or Boer 
flags — ^latterly under their own — have played 
a. part only less than the British and Dutch ; 
and French hunters, missionaries, explorers, 
miners and settlers have, in addition, engraved 
their names somewhat deeply on South 
African history and geography between 
Barotseland and Natal during the nineteenth 
century. 

The position of the Dutch West India 
Company on the Vv^est coast of Africa was 
rather affected in the second half of the 
seventeenth century by the rise of colonial 
ambition and interest in the slave-trade 
displayed by France and Britain. France 
in 1677-78 took Rufisque, Goree and the 
other Senegambian forts from the Dutch, 
and turned them out of Senegal (acquiring 
Arguin in 1724); while the Danes (1657) and 
later the British (1668) interfered with the 
Dutch monopoly of the Gold Coast. Never- 
theless during the seventeenth and eighteenth 
centuries the Dutch established eighteen 
fortified slave-trading depots between Axim 
and Akkra — the principal of which were 



190 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

Elmina, Kormantyn and Annamabu — and 
exported four or five millions of negroes 
to English-speaking North America, to the 
British and French West Indies, to Guiana 
and Brazil. They and the Danes ( Christians - 
borg to the Volta) traded mainly in slaves 
till 1840, leaving the trade in gold-dust more 
to the English company. 

The Dutch and Danish possessions in West 
Africa lost much of their importance when 
slavery as well as the slave-trade was abolished 
by the Dutch government in 1848. Danish 
rights on the eastern Gold Coast were pur- 
chased by the British government in 1850, 
and the Dutch forts and towns were finally 
made over to Great Britain in 1871 in exchange 
for other claims in the Far East. The chief 
importance of the Dutch settlements on the 
Gold Coast in the history of West Africa lay 
in the wide scope they gave to the slave-trade, 
with the consequent increase of power and 
importance gained by the kingdom of Ashanti, 
and the penetration of West Africa by Euro- 
pean fire-arms, alcohol, and cloth manufac- 
tures, with their consequent effect on native 
communities. But undoubtedly the Dutch 
hold over the Gold Coast (and trade with 
West Africa generally) greatly increased the 
world's scanty stock of information as to the 
native tribes, the fauna and flora of this part 
of the continent. Agents of the Dutch West 
India Company, such as Dr. O. Dapper in 
the seventeenth and Willem Bosman in the 



THE FRENCH IN AFRICA 191 

eighteenth century, have left us remarkable 
books describing the condition in these periods 
of the Grain Coast (Liberia), Sierra Leone, 
the Gold Coast and Dahome. Moreover the 
Dutch hold over the Gold Coast (which from 
the beginning of the nineteenth century was 
directly exercised under the Dutch Crown) 
left behind it a useful race of Dutch half- 
castes which endures to this day, and furnishes 
minor employes in the British administration 
of that region, and in the leading commercial 
and mining enterprises. 



CHAPTER X 

THE FRENCH IN AFRICA 

The exact date at which the French Empire 
in Africa began is uncertain. There is, of 
course, the tradition already referred to of the 
Norman trading-stations on the Liberian and 
Gold Coasts in the fourteenth century, but 
from various causes French maritime enter- 
prise died away almost completely during the 
fifteenth century, and was only stirred to fresh 
energy at the close of that period by the need 
for salted fish, which sent their hardy Breton 
and Norman mariners to Newfoundland. 
During the sixteenth century French enter- 
prise was mainly absorbed in American dis- 
covery, but attempts were made, more or less 
in co-operation with those of the English, to 



192 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

break through the Portuguese monopoly of 
West Africa. These did not meet with much 
success. It was only at the beginning of the 
seventeenth century (especially in 1624) when, 
being at war with Spain, and Spain having 
absorbed Portugal, the French renewed their 
expeditions in West African discovery and 
seem to have directed them mainly towards 
the Senegal river, which after all was at no 
very great distance from the west coast of 
France. The first noteworthy voyage to the 
Senegal in the seventeenth century was that 
of 1637, which was commanded by Captain 
Lambert and accompanied as soldier and 
historian by Claude Jannequin de Rochfort. 
The party constructed a small boat out of 
timber brought from France, and left their 
big ship at the mouth of the Senegal river, 
which stream they explored for 210 miles 
inland. On this journey they obtained con- 
cessions from the natives on which (after 
the fashion of those times and of our own) it 
was attempted to found a chartered Norman 
company. This company sold its rights to 
the French West India Company, and the 
latter passed them on to a subsidiary associa- 
tion eventually named the " Royal Senegal." 
The Dutch proving hostile to French trading 
operations, their Senegambian forts were 
seized in 1677-78. 

After Louis XIV came to the throne, and 
rose by degrees to be the leading monarch of 
Europe, French pirates and adventurers 



THE FRENCH IN AFRICA 193 

founded (besides other settlements in the 
West Indies) the colony of St. Domingue 
on the western half of the island of His- 
paniola ; and therefore required African slaves 
in large numbers for West Indian develop- 
ment. No longer content to be dependent 
on the Dutch for supplies of negroes for the 
American plantations, the Royal Senegal 
Company proceeded vigorously to develop 
their settlements at or near the mouth of 
the Senegal river, and rebuilt Fort St. Louis 
about 1683, on the site chosen by Captain 
Lambert in 1637. They sent out in 1696 a 
very able man to attend to their affairs, Andre 
de Briie, who combined the qualities of a man 
of science and a far-sighted trader, and really 
laid the foundations of the French empire 
in West Africa. Briie made two exploring 
journeys up the Senegal and into the interior, 
and spent some fifteen years altogether on the 
coast of Senegambia. He visited himself, or 
through accredited agents, the gold country 
of Bambuk, the mountainous region on the 
Upper Senegal. It is pleasant to note that 
after all his adventures, dangers and attacks 
of fever, he eventually returned to France in 
1715 and lived quietly and happily for a long 
time afterwards on the large fortune he had 
accumulated : for he was no mere slave-trader, 
but a man who strove to win the affections of 
the people and to establish an honest trade 
with them. He inspired similar ideas in 
the agents whom he dispatched up country. 



194 THE OPENING UP OF AFHICA 

notable amongst whom was Campagnon, whom 
I have described m another work as the ideal, 
good-tempered, good-looking, supple, kind- 
hearted, valorous Frenchman.^ 

In 1748 the Royal Senegal Company 
enabled Michel Adanson, a man of science 
and of Scotch ancestry, to conduct a five 
years' exploration of the fauna and flora of 
Senegambia : researches which very greatly 
increased the then scanty knowledge of the 
productions of Tropical Africa. Among other 
strange objects which he described and figured 
was the Baobab tree, named after him by 
Linnseus " Adansonia." His great book the 
Histoire naturelle du Sinegal teems with 
interest. The French continued to develop 
their Senegal settlements with some prosperity 
until 1758, when they were captured by the 
British, who held them until 1778, and again 
took them in 1783 and held them throughout 
the Napoleonic wars. Consequently, for more 
than half a century France had no foothold 
on the coast of Africa, except at intervals for 
a year or two when she was allowed to resume 
possession of Fort St. Louis and the island of 
Goree. 

The invasion of Egypt by Napoleon Bona- 
parte in 1798 came as a thunderclap to Europe 
and Asia. It was the first bold attack on the 
empire of Islam, on the closed Oriental world, 

1 In the late Dr. Robert ^vowri^ Story of the Exploration 
of Africa, p. 160, will be found a cbarming anecdote of 
Campagnon's kindness to animals. 



THE FRENCH IN AFRICA 195 

since the abortive Crusades had died away in 
Charles V's unsuccessful attempts to found a 
Spanish empire in North Africa. Yet though 
the landing of Napoleon with a French army of 
forty thousand men at Alexandria on July 2, 
1798, seemed a wholly erratic action without 
any connection with past purposes of the 
French government, in reality the idea of the 
conquest of Egypt had been for more than a 
hundred years occurring ever and again to a 
French king or statesman or philosopher. A 
French company had been created by Cardinal 
Richelieu in 1642 to colonize Madagaskar, and 
this island had been formally annexed by 
repeated orders-in-council of Louis XIV and of 
the succeeding Regency; Mauritius had been 
colonized in 1721, the islet of Ste. Marie 
(off Madagaskar) in 1750, and Bourbon (Re- 
union) in 1764 (the Seychelles in 1744). These 
acquisitions were mainly intended as stepping- 
stones to India, guardians of the ocean route. 
But they had a growing value of their own 
and — like India — might be more speedily 
reached from the Red Sea coast of Egypt than 
all the way round the Cape of Good Hope. 

Sonnini, a young Alsatian naturalist of 
Italian origin, had been dispatched by the 
French government at the instances of Buffon 
to explore Egypt. His journeys, which began 
about 1775, revealed the weak and disordered 
state of the country under the anarchical rule 
of the Circassian beys. 

All these circumstances came to the mind of 

G2 



196 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

Napoleon Bonaparte when he had conquered 
Italy, and, gazing eastward from the port of 
Ancona, had realized that the whole Turkish 
Empire was an easy prey to a modern Alex- 
ander. And above all that the occupation of 
Egypt was the necessary keystone of an empire 
dominating Europe and Asia. 

He forgot, however, that the necessary corol- 
lary of an undisturbed hold over Egypt is a 
supremacy in sea-power. The British, possess- 
ing that supremacy, expelled the French from 
Egypt and prevented their achieving the 
conquest of Syria : an event which might have 
forestalled by more than a hundred years the 
regeneration and civilization of the Muham- 
madan world. But though Napoleon failed 
in his enterprise his invasion of Egypt "brought 
the Valley of the Nile into close touch with the 
thought of the West." His expedition was 
accompanied by a body of archaeologists and 
naturalists; their discovery of the Rosetta 
stone with its trilingual inscriptions furnished 
the key to the decipherment of the Egyptian 
hieroglyphic writing, and by degrees unlocked 
the wonderful history of ancient Egypt. The 
impetus thus given to the development of 
Egypt and its detachment from the stupid, 
know-nothing sphere of ignorant fanatical 
Turkish Muhammadanism was scarcely dimi- 
nished by the departure of the French troops. 
The renewed irrigation of Egypt, the founda- 
tion of a strong dynasty, the conquest and 
opening up of the Sudan, the cutting of the 



THE FRENCH IN AFRICA 197 

Suez Canal, the vast improvement in the 
condition of the patient Egyptian peasantry 
and their corresponding increase in numbers : 
all these were the consequences, direct and 
indirect, of Napoleon's strmge crusade, 
which opened a new era in the history of 
Africa. 

It was not until the year 1817, when the 
British government restored all the posts on the 
Senegal and adjoining coasts to France, that 
the French resumed their work as explorers 
in West Africa. But from this year — 1817 — • 
they lost no time; for within twelve months 
Mollien had discovered the sources of the 
Gambia and De Beaufort had explored the 
country of Kaarta through which Mungo Park 
had travelled, to the north-east of the Senegal 
river. In 1827 a remarkable young French- 
man of Poitou, Rene Caillie, who had ex- 
plored Senegambia between 1818 and 1824, 
started with a hardly-gained sum of eighty 
pounds, to find, his way to Timbuktu. He 
did not derive much assistance or encourage- 
ment from the French, but, curiously enough, 
was helped by the British administration of 
Sierra Leone. He left the Guinea Coast at 
the river Nunez, near the colony of Sierra 
Leone, and travelling by a circuitous route, 
crossed the Upper Niger, reached Jenne, near 
the Bani-Niger confluence, from which point 
he descended that river as far as Timbuktu. 
During this journey he passed as a Muham- 
madan and professed to be an Egyptian Arab 



198 THE OTENING UP OF AFRICA 

returning to Egypt. From Timbuktu he 
actually succee ded in accompanying a caravan 
across the desert to the south of Morocco, 
whence he contrived to reach the French 
consulate at Tangier. In the first half of 
the nineteent 1 century the French settle- 
ments on the Upper Senegal and their ad- 
vance towards the Niger were threatened or 
obstructed by the rise of the Fula and the 
Tukulor power under the great conquerors, 
Sheikhu Ahmadu and Al Haj Omar. Fula 
arms by degrees completely blocked the way 
between the Seneg&l settlements and the 
Niger. And beside this barrier French atten- 
tion until 1854 turned av/ay from Senegal to 
be concentrated on a North African enter- 
prise, the capture of Algiers and the conquest 
of Algeria. 

The Algerine pirates, or corsairs, like those 
of Sali and Rabat in Morocco, Tunis and 
Tripoli in Eastern Barbary, had been inter- 
mittently a terror in the Mediterranean 
since the beginning of the sixteenth century. 
They were equivalent to the privateers of 
British and French naval warfare in later 
centuries. That is to say, they were bold 
pirates whose enterprise was not reproved 
(or was even sanctioned) by the governing 
authority of their country, provided it was 
convenient to do so. They were to some 
extent called into existence by the aggressive 
attitude of Charles V, king of Spain and 
emperor of Germany, who, not content v/ith 



THE FRENCH IN AFRICA 199 

expelling the last of the Moors from Spain, 
had attempted between 1535 and 1560 to 
found a Spanish empire in North Africa. 
Charles V, as already related, failed; but the 
Arabs, Berbers and Turks of the North 
African littoral found their privateering so 
profitable that they extended it in all direc- 
tions. Moorish pirate ships frequently raided 
the coasts of Ireland, of western France, 
and even of the English Channel. Italy, 
perhaps, was their favourite prey, because it 
was near at hand and wealthy, and Italian 
slaves proved excellent material for the 
workshops of North Africa, or very fre- 
quently, like the Greeks, were persuaded to 
adopt the Muhammadan religion, and then 
became useful officers in the service of the 
state. In fact, some of the most dreaded of 
the Barbary pirates were really Europeans 
in origin— Slavs, Italians, Greeks, Spaniards 
or Frenchmen. There were even English 
and Scottish renegados ^ who played important 
parts in the development of Tunisian or 
Moorish industries. Such European powers 
as attempted by naval force to smash the 
pirates' strongholds in North Africa or defeat 
their fleets met with but poor success until 
the nineteenth century ; and usually the 
European powers preferred to enter into 
treaties of friendship with the different deys, 
beys and sultans of Barbary, and even sub- 
sidized them to keep the peace. 
^ Those who were renegades, or who denied their faith. 



200 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

After the Napoleonic wars were over Great 
Britain, in conjunction with Holland, decided 
to put a stop to this nuisance as far as their 
own subjects were concerned; and an allied 
British and Dutch fleet bombarded Algiers 
in 1818, while a British fleet soon afterwards, 
without bombardment, induced Tunis to 
renounce in future the principle of enslaving 
Christians or making any attacks on the com- 
merce of friendly powers. The United States 
had been obliged to take similar action in 
regard to Tripoli in 1802-5 and 1815. But 
France had not solved the question, no doubt 
through herloss of a fleet during the Napoleonic 
wars. The dey of Algiers quarrelled with 
the French consul about the question of a 
French inheritance, and losing his temper 
struck him lightly in the face with a fan. 
This occurred in 1827, but three years 
elapsed before the French could dispatch 
a punitive expedition to enforce their de- 
mands for reparation. It has been asserted 
that the French government of the dying 
monarchy of Charles X intended merely to 
batter the fortifications of Algiers, bring the 
dey to terms, and then withdraw. But this 
is doubtful in view of the time and interest 
taken in preparing the expedition and the 
attaching to it of several of the Frenchmen 
learned in Arabic and Muhammadan customs, 
who had served in Egypt more than thirty 
years previously. It is probable that the 
loss of Egypt, which rankled much in French 



THE FRENCH IN AFRICA 201 

memories, was to be atoned for by a conquest 
of Algeria. 

The French troops captured Algiers on 
July 5, 1830, after a three-weeks' siege. The 
dey was allowed to leave the country with 
his private fortune. The monarchy of the 
Bourbons was succeeded by that of the junior 
house of Orleans. After four years' delay 
spent in gauging the strength of British op- 
position the French determined to conquer 
Algeria. They had already in 1830-1 seized 
all the principal ports on the coast from 
Bona on the east to Oran on the west, a 
policy to which the agricultural natives of 
the mountains and the interior were indif- 
ferent, having been accustomed from time 
immemorial to see the coast ports in the hands 
of foreigners. But as soon as the French 
attempted to extend their administration 
inland they aroused native apprehensions, 
especially in the warlike regions of western 
Algeria, where the people, more akin to 
those of Morocco, were less inclined to put 
up with foreign domination. Such tribes 
found a leader in Abd-al-Kader, a young Arab 
of good family, who had already acquired 
a great reputation amongst the people of 
western Algeria by his bravery, piety and elo- 
quence. He was proclaimed Amir (prince) at 
Maskara in 1832. 

In 1834 the French established a governor- 
general for the French possessions in the north 
of Africa. Abd-al-Kader then advanced east- 



202 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

wards and defeated the French near Algiers. 
In turn he was defeated by another French 
army under Clause]. Till 1847, however, the 
French were at intervals fighting with Abd-al- 
Kader and with the tribes whom he had raised 
against them. This dragged them into a 
war with Morocco, ended quickly by French 
victories, and finally in 1847 Abd-al-Kader 
surrendered, and after being kept prisoner 
for some years in a French fortress was 
released and allowed to live at Damascus, 
where he died in 1883. By 1848 the French ^ 
had conquered the last independent poten- 
tate — the bey of Constantine — and had 
declared all Algeria from the frontiers of 
Tunis and those of Morocco to be divided into 
three departments, which were to be ruled 
as part of France with the right of representa- 
tion in the French Parliament. Under the 
Second Empire, however, this constitutional 
government was put aside in favour of a 
military despotism which was to ally itself 
as much as possible with the administration 
of powerful native families or chiefs in the 
interior. But as European colonists began 
to settle in Algeria this unenlightened rule of 
the military was found intolerable, and in 
1858 Algeria was erected into a dependency 
something like the Indian Empire is to 
Britain, and was to be governed by a ministry 
established in Paris. This plan, however, 
proved a failure and was abolished in 1863, 
military despotism being again resumed. 



THE FRENCH IN AFRICA 203 

But Algeria was seized with discontent and 
unrest, and in 1870 one of the last acts of the 
empire was to call together a commission to 
suggest a form of government in Algeria which 
might prove successful. The finding of this 
commission, supported by a vote in the French 
Parliament, decided in favour of civil rule, and 
its recommendation would have been carried 
into effect but for the outbreak of the Franco- 
German War and the great insurrection which 
followed in the eastern part of Algeria. 
Military government consequently was con- 
tinued, although Algeria was permitted to 
send deputies to the French Parliament and 
the franchise for the election of these deputies 
— then held only by Europeans, and still 
withheld from the indigenous Arabs and 
Berbers — was extended to the Jews, a measure 
which at first excited great anger both in 
France and Algeria and which has only recently 
ceased to be unpopular. 

Between 1848 and 1880 numerous attempts 
were made to induce French people to settle 
in Algeria, while at the same time some 
encouragement was offered to the subjects of 
other powers. At one time young soldiers 
would be selected from the French army who 
were married to poor girls dowered by the 
state, and then sent to Algeria with promises 
of land. In 1871 about 11,000 natives of 
Alsace-Lorraine, who disliked the idea of be- 
coming German subjects, were granted ^and 
in Algeria, and subsequently another 25,000 



204 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

French colonists were established at an outlay 
of over half-a-million sterling. 

It has been the custom to laugh at most of 
these experiments, and certainly at first they 
gave poor results. Large areas of Algeria 
though pleasant to the eye and endowed with 
a fairly good climate (from the European 
point of view) were exceedingly malarious, 
because they were undrained and the stagnant 
water bred innumerable mosquitoes which 
conveyed various germ-diseases to the blood 
of Europeans. Algerian agriculture proved 
to be very different to the tilling and planting 
of fields in Northern and Western Europe. 
Lions still existed in some numbers, and 
panthers were numerous, together with hyenas, 
and these beasts attacked the livestock of the 
European settlers, while their fowls were killed 
by wild cats. Locusts and many forms of 
beetle ravaged their crops. A despairing 
drought would be followed by a devastating 
flood : it was in fact the now familiar history 
of similar attempts to open up not only 
Africa but all ground new to European ideas. 
It is only now as one begins to look back that 
one can see that these colonizing efforts on the 
part of France have had a distinct measure of 
success, especially where the Alsatians were 
concerned. One meets with Alsatians — many 
of them still retaining the use of the German 
language — all over all Algeria, even in the 
most remote parts — cheerful, healthy, sober, 
industrious people. At the present time there 



THE FRENCH IN AFRICA 205 

are about 279,000 colonists of French or Al- 
satian descent in Algeria. Still more numer- 
ouSj however, are the Europeans descended 
from other nationalities. Spanish is more 
commonly the language of Oran and the 
neighbouring coast towns than French; and 
Italian is as much spoken as French at 
Bona, Constantine, and even as far inland as 
Tebessa. There are something like 205,000 
Spaniards or people of Spanish descent in 
the western part of Algeria. They are not 
a high-class people as a rule, and are chiefly 
restricted to menial occupations. Still, 
physically they seem to thrive, and they 
certainly increase and multiply. They are 
taking up more and more land, and have a 
great future before them if they give them- 
selves up to agriculture. The eastern part of 
Algeria had attracted about 125,000 Italians 
and Maltese, nearly all of whom have become 
naturalized as French subjects. There are 
65,000 Jews, of Italian and Spanish origin and 
also of ancient settlement in North Africa. An 
increasing intermixture is going on between 
the French, the Italians, the Spaniards and 
the Jews on one hand, and the native races 
on the other. The Arabs and Berbers in the 
settled parts of the country are approximat- 
ing more and more in their mode of life, and 
even in their costumes, to Europeans, and, as 
in Tunis, the Berber is tending to dissociate 
himself somewhat from the Arab and draw 
nearer to the European with whom physicaKy 



206 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

he is nearly allied. Yet owing to the trade 
in slaves encouraged by the Turks, there is 
a very considerable element of black blood 
in Algeria, and this, by its permeation under 
the protection of the Muhammadan religion, 
which recognizes no racial inferiority due to 
colour, will tend to keep the fused popula- 
tion of Algeria a people of somewhat dark 
complexion. 

The growth of the French empire in Algeria 
naturally caused France to think of extensions 
to the east, west and south. Tunis was coveted 
during the 'sixties of the last century, the 
more so as at that period this Turkish regency 
was becoming somewhat Britannicized owing 
to the proximity of Malta and the importa- 
tion of Englishmen to construct and manage 
waterworks, gasworks, railways and light- 
houses. At the same time the unification of 
Italy gave that power a greater say in Medi- 
terranean matters. The regency of Tunis 
was situated close to Sicily and large numbers 
of Italians were wont to resort to the coast of 
Tunis as artisans, traders and fishermen. 
In fact, Tunisia was the first colony the 
Italians thought of when they had established 
their complete independence of Austria and 
France. But in informal discussions which 
took place between various statesmen and 
the Emperor Napoleon III it was generally 
recognized that Tunis must fall eventually to 
France; and in 1878, at the Berlin Conference, 
the ill -humour of France at the British acqui- 



THE FRENCH IN AFRICA 207 

sition of Cyprus was calmed by a hint that 
no opposition would be put in the way of her 
acquiring Tunis. Consequently, advantage 
was taken of a pretext in 1881 (the unrest 
amongst the frontier tribes) and a French 
army marched across the regency of Tunis 
along the line of the newly-made French 
railway and established a French protectorate 
over that regency. 

In 1883 a further treaty with the bey of 
Tunis brought the government of that state 
completely under French control, while the 
powers of Europe surrendered their consular 
jurisdiction and recognized that of the French 
courts, following up that action later on by 
the abandonment of their commercial treaties 
with the bey in favour of direct arrangements 
made with France. From the commencement 
of 1898 Tunis — though it is still regarded as a 
protectorate and the native dynasty of beys 
(descended from a Turkish soldier who ac- 
quired command of the country in 1718) — 
has been as much a part of the French 
empire as Cochin China. It is also an ex- 
ample of unqualified success in French colonial 
administration, and at the present day its 
population of Berbers, Arabs, Jews, and over 
100,000 Europeans is quite contented with 
French supervision. In fact. Fate has done 
justice at last to North Africa, and through 
France had restored the beneficent aspects 
of Roman rule which fifteen hundred years 
ago had made all Tunis and Algeria one 



208 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

of the most flourishing parts of the world, 
filled with beautiful cities, irrigated with 
abundant water, and covered with olive 
woods, orchards, timber forests and prairies 
of waving corn. 

It is to be hoped sincerely that no inter- 
national jealousies will withhold from France 
the same opportunities in regard to Morocco, 
a country which has scarcely been a year 
without civil or foreign war since the break- 
up of the Roman Empire, and yet which 
possesses an indigenous population that under 
proper management should become one of 
the finest races in the world in physique and 
in intelligence. It is magnificently endowed 
by nature with mineral and even vegetable 
resources. Its snow-capped, glaciated moun- 
tains diffuse a moisture which makes the 
western parts of North Africa more favour- 
able to vegetation than the centre or the 
east. Under the rule of Spain in the north 
and the supervision of France over all the 
rest of its turbulent tribes and misused lands, 
Morocco should become one of the wealthiest, 
healthiest and best-populated regions of the 
earth's surface. 

On the Senegal river and in Senegambia 
the French made a notable advance when, 
in 1854, General Faidherbe was sent to Senegal, 
in quasi-exile, as governor-general. He was 
a man of great enterprise and intelligence, 
and set himself to work to study the people 
and languages and the commercial possi- 



THE FRENCH IN AFRICA 209 

bilities of this part of West Africa. He led 
expeditions which inflicted well-deserved 
punishment on the Moorish tribes dwelling 
to the north of the Senegal river, tribes 
which besides their unprovoked cruelties to 
European explorers had perpetually ravaged 
the settled country inhabited by industrious 
agricultural negroes. By 1855 Faidherbe had 
annexed the Wuli country between the Senegal 
and the Gambia and had defeated and checked 
the Tukulor (hybrid Fula) conqueror Al Haj 
Omar. Shortly afterwards, Faidherbe ex- 
tended the colony of Senegal to near the 
miouth of the Gambia and took over for 
France a great deal of what was vaguely 
known as Portuguese Guinea, between the 
Gambia and Sierra Leone. 

A suspension of French activity occurred 
after the Franco-German War, but in 1880 a 
new interest was shown in West Africa, part 
of the growing feeling encouraged by Gam- 
betta and Jules Ferry that France might seek 
compensation for her disasters on the Rhine 
by the creation of a great colonial empire in 
Africa. In short, domination over the Niger 
had become the objective of French policy 
on the Senegal, together with the idea of 
uniting the French possessions in Algeria 
with those of West Africa across the Sahara 
Desert. The advance to the Niger began in 
1880. By 1883 a fort had been built at 
Bamaku, and in 1887 a treaty was concluded 
with Ahmadu, the Fula sultan of Segu, But 



210 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

this was only a truce : the Tula power fought 
against the French advance and was de- 
feated. The country of Kaarta (where Mungo 
Park once suffered so much) was occupied in 
1890, the historic and famous city of Jenne 
in 1893. Once Jenne was in French hands 
an advance on Timbuktu was inevitable : 
that city of romantic fame surrendered to 
a French naval officer, six French sub- 
ordinates, and twelve Senegalese soldiers, in 
December 1893, and has at last found peace 
and uninterrupted commercial development 
after the two hundred years of anarchy 
which followed the withdrawal of Moorish 
rule, and was chiefly occasioned by the alter- 
nate efforts of Tuaregs and Fulas to possess 
themselves of or to plunder the city. 

The remarkable journeys of Colonel Binger 
(1887-9, 1892-3) enabled France to enlarge 
enormously her protectorate of the Ivory 
Coast. This region, consisting mainly of 
dense forest and situated between Liberia 
and the Gold Coast, had remained the most 
unknown part of the West African littoral 
down to the time of Binger 's explorations. The 
first French factories were founded on the 
lagoons and shore of the Ivory Coast about 
1700-7. In 1842 Assini and Grand Bassum 
were ceded to France. The region became 
an extensive French colony in 1893. Binger 
elucidated most of the mystery of the Niger 
Bend, bringing to light the immense extent 
of the basins of the Black and the White 



THE FRENCH IN AFRICA 211 

Volta rivers, and thereby diminishing the 
area of drainage formerly attributed to the 
Niger. But the extension of French control 
over the Ivory Coast hinterland (sometimes 
called the mountainous countries of Kong) 
brought them into conflict with Samori, a 
great Mandingo religious leader and chief 
who had previously conquered the Fula of 
the Upper Nig-er. Samori was, however, 
defeated and finally captured in 1898. 

About 1842 Marseilles trading-houses had 
re-established factories on the coast of Dahome 
and at Porto Novo, near Lagos. These grew 
by the assent or withdrawal of other powers 
into a French sphere of influence over Dahome, 
a celebrated sanguinary kingdom at one 
time under Portuguese influence or treating 
for a British protectorate. The orgie of 
blood which formed part of the court cere- 
monial of Dahome, the almost annual raids 
made by the despot of that country on his 
neighbours to the east and west, caused this 
negro kingdom, like Benin and Ashanti, to 
be an Augean stable which no European 
power was inclined to clean out, having 
regard to the costliness and difficult character 
of any far-reaching expedition. However, 
France entrusted this task to a brave general 
of English descent, A. A. Dodds, and after 
a short campaign in 1892, Dahome was 
conquered and has remained peaceful and 
increasingly prosperous ever since. The pos-^ 
session of Dahome drew France towards the 



212 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

Lower Niger, and in the country of Borgu 
British and French interests clashed for a 
time : eventually Borgu was divided between 
them, while by similar arrangements France 
acquired the northernmost parts of Sokoto 
and Hausaland (Zinder). She had effectu- 
ally occupied Kanem and Bagirmi (shores 
of Lake Chad) and all the principal oases of 
the Sahara by 1906, having in 1900 won the 
Lake Chad regions from the usurping and 
devastating rule of Rabah. Rabah was a 
Sudanese adventurer who in 1879 had left 
the Egyptian Sudan with a motley force 
and had conquered Dar Banda, Bagirmi, 
and other kingdoms. In Bornu (1893) he 
had dispossessed, but fortunately not ex- 
terminated, the interesting dynasty of the 
Kanemi sheikhs, the first representative of 
which — Muhammad-al-Amin-Kanemi — had 
first saved Bornu from the Fula conquests 
and secondly had accorded such a friendly 
reception to the explorers sent out by Great 
Britain, 1822-3, to reach Bornu and Lake 
Chad. This Kanemi dynasty was subsequently 
restored by the British. 

The last conquest of France in the central 
Sudan has been Wadai : the last stronghold 
of the slave-trade, the region of Africa 
wherein the Muhammadan negro and negroid 
are most bitterly opposed to the non-Muham- 
madan white man. Wadai until two or three 
years ago was almost unknown in its geo- 
graphy. It had been crossed by Nachtigal 



THE FRENCH IN AFRICA 213 

in 1873, but most of the other Europeans 
who entered this territory were murdered. 
With the complete occupation of Wadai by 
French forces the last slave-producing area of 
Negro Africa is closed to the Nubian, Arab 
and Moorish purveyors of negro girls and 
eunuchs to the harims of Tripoli, Turkey, 
Arabia and Persia. 

At present the bulk of the French troops, 
stores, and officials reach Wadai and Bagirmi 
not across the Sahara or from the Niger, 
but by way of the Congo. When during the 
reign of Louis Philippe France participated 
in the suppression of the oversea slave- 
trade, she attempted to create a freed-slave 
colony at the mouth of the Gaboon estuary, 
a broad river-mouth on the coast between 
the Kamerun and the Congo. Gradually 
the Gaboon settlement ceased to be a home 
for freed slaves and became a French trading 
colony. It was extended to the Ogowe 
river, and the ascent of the Ogowe and its 
tributaries brought French explorers like 
De Brazza (of Italian origin) to within a few 
marches of navigable streams flowing into the 
great Congo above Stanley Pool. This was 
in 1880, when H. M. Stanley was attempting 
to create the Congo state for the king of the 
Belgians. The rivalry between an Italian 
acting on behalf of France and a Welshman 
representing the king of the Belgians was 
very keen, but it resulted in France securing 
much of the western basin of the Congo; and 



214 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

the whole course of its great northern affluent, 
the Mubangi-Welle, as the southern boundary 
of the vast French sphere in Central Africa, 
a sphere which was afterwards easily ex- 
tended to the White Nile until the battle of 
Omdurman and the Anglo-French Agreement 
of 1898 gave the basin of the Nile to Great 
Britain. 

From the Congo and the Mubangi, French 
explorers like Crampel, Dybowski and Gentil, 
crossed into the basin of the Shari and its 
complex tributaries, and by 1899 the French 
Congo territories were linked up with those 
of the Shari and Lake Chad. The develop- 
ment of these forested countries of West 
Equatorial Africa under the flag of France 
has not been so happy and comparatively 
peaceful as the fate of French Nigeria and 
Senegambia. The bad example of the king 
of the Belgians was followed; and French, 
like Belgian, Congo was divided up amongst 
a number of concessionnaire companies with- 
out any regard for the rights of the indigenous 
natives or the free - trade principles estab- 
lished by the Congress of Berlin within 
the conventional basin of the Congo. But, 
elsewhere, in Africa — not forgetting the great 
island of Madagaskar which France con- 
quered from the selfish and often cruel rule of 
the Hova tribe in 1895-6 — the future writers 
of history who have carefully studied the re- 
cords of the Africa of the nineteenth century 
will be able to accord France a very honour- 



THE BRITISH WORK IN AFRICA 215 

able role in the opening up of Africa, viewing 
these achievements not only from the point 
of \dew of gains to science and commerce, 
but of the material and mental welfare of 
the indigenous races. 



CHAPTER XI 

THE BRITISH WORK IN AFRICA 

About 1550 there came to Southampton 
a Portuguese named Antonio Anes Pinteado, 
a native of Oporto, who had been a pilot or 
master of a ship trading frequently between 
Lisbon and West Africa. He conceived him- 
self to have been treated most unjustly by 
his king and desired in revenge to sell his 
services to English traders and bring them 
out to West Africa to contest the Portuguese 
monopoly. The expedition which he led to 
the Benin river turned out disastrously owing 
to the ravages of malarial fever, and Pin- 
teado lost his life, but from that time onwards 
English ships went in increasing numbers to 
the west coast of Africa to trade for gold, 
ivory, gum, civet perfume, hides, beeswax, 
cotton goods, dyes, and, above all, spice and 
pepper. After the assumption of the Portu- 
guese crown by the king of Spain, more 
Portuguese came to England and offered their 
services as guides and pilots to British ships, 
and were indirectly the cause of Queen Eliza- 



216 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

beth granting charters and monopolies to 
British companies of adventurers to trade 
with Morocco and West Africa. In Eliza- 
beth's reign also British sea-captains sailed 
their ships round the Cape of Good Hope to 
India and took cognizance of the island of 
St. Helena on their way. 

During the reign of James I ships and 
merchants were dispatched by English com- 
panies to the Gambia and the Gold Coast, 
the Gambia river more especially being 
thoroughly explored by a remarkable pioneer, 
Captain Richard Jobson. As early as 1562 
Sir John Hawkins had purchased or captured 
negro slaves at various places along the West 
African coast between the Gambia and the 
Gold Coast, visiting especially the peninsula 
and river of Sierra Leone. But after these 
adventures the British took no further interest 
in the slave-trade until the growth of their 
North American and West Indian colonies 
and their quarrels with the Dutch in the 
middle of the 17th century made it necessary 
for them to do their own slave-trading on 
the west coast of Africa. Under Charles II a 
chartered company was firmly established on 
the Gold Coast and on the Gambia, and from 
its operations began, without any interrup- 
tion, the growth of the immense British West 
African empire of the present day. 

When the feeling of the nation began to 
turn against the slave-trade a new interest 
was felt in the opening up of Africa. It was 



THE BRITISH WORK IN AFRICA 217 

sought by practical philanthropists to sub- 
stitute an honest commerce for the traffic in 
slaves. This impulse not only led to the 
foundation of the settlement at Sierra Leone 
(primarily for the repatriation of freed Ameri- 
can negroes), but the search for the Niger 
river. A powerful association was founded 
in England for African research (a body which 
afterwards developed into the Royal Geo- 
graphical Society of to-day), and this asso- 
ciation dispatched Mungo Park by way of 
the Gambia to discover the Niger and trace 
its course to the sea, a feat which, in the 
direct service of the British government, he 
nearly accompHshed at a later date, losing 
his life at the Rapids of Busa. Under either 
this association or the direct action of the 
British government the Congo was traced 
from its mouth upwards to the Rapids of 
Isangila by the Tuckey expedition, and Major 
Alexander Laing (who had already in an 
expedition from Sierra Leone located ap- 
proximately the source of the Niger) was dis- 
patched in 1825 to find his way across the 
Sahara Desert from Tripoli to Ghat and Tim- 
buktu. He reached that far-famed city, and 
the Northern Niger, but on his return journey 
was assassinated in the desert by the Tuareg. . 
In 1818-19 the regency of Tripoli and J 
Fezzan were explored by Consul Ritchie and 
Captain George Lyon, R.N. In 1821-22 
they were succeeded by a still better equipped 
expedition conducted by Dr. Oudney, Com- 



218 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

mander Hugh Clapperton, R.N., and Major 
Dixon Denham. Oudney died in Bornu, 
after the discovery of Lake Chad, but Den- 
ham penetrated to the Shari river,, and Clap- 
perton travelled through Hausaland and Kano 
to Sokoto, and obtained much information 
about the Lower Niger. Thus Lake Chad 
and the Shari river were discovered by Britons 
first of all Europeans, at any rate since pre- 
historic times. Clapperton, in a second ex- 
pedition, reached the Lower Niger from the 
Lagos coast and died at Sokoto. His com- 
panion, Richard Lander, afterwards returned 
with a brother and traced the Niger from Busa 
— where Mungo Park had died — to its outlet 
in the Gulf of Guinea. 

British interest in the Nile may be said to 
have begun in that great revival of science 
and learning which marked the reign of 
Charles II. The books pubhshed by the 
Jesuit missionaries in Abyssinia were trans- 
lated into English and eagerly read. Scholarly 
British travellers, such as Pococke, had visited 
Egypt in the early part of the eighteenth 
century, and gradually the enigma of the 
Nile haunted the imagination not only of 
English scholars and philosophers, but of such 
British statesmen as the first Lord Halifax. 
This minister encouraged and assisted the 
Scottish traveller, James Bruce (who already, 
as a consul, had explored Algeria and Tunis), 
to trace the Nile to its ultimate source. 
Bruce started in 1766 for Egypt, accompanied 



THE BRITISH WORK IN AFRICA 219 

by an Italian artist-assistant. He ascended 
the Nile to the First Cataract, then crossed to 
the Red Sea coast, and, after a circuitous 
journey by way of Arabia, landed at Masawa, 
the port of Abyssinia, and thence made his 
way to the capital of the emperor, who re- 
ceived him with great favour, and enabled 
him to reach the source of the Blue Nile. 
Bruce, like the Portuguese missionaries, was 
convinced that the head-stream of the Nile 
was the Blue River of Abyssinia, which rises 
in Lake Tsana. He followed the Blue Nile 
downstream till he reached its confluence 
with the White Nile at the site of Khartum. 
Not long after his return to England (in 1775) 
he wrote a pamphlet pointing out the im- 
portance of establishing a British control over 
Egypt in view of the development of the 
East India Company's possessions in India 
and the consequent necessity to control Egypt 
as a half-way stage on the necessary overland 
route to the East. 

But any ideas which the British govern- 
ment may have begun to entertain of exer- 
cising a special influence over Egypt were 
interrupted, and yet at the same time pre- 
cipitated, by the descent of Napoleon Bona- 
parte on that country in 1798. The British 
forces eventually obliged the French to 
evacuate Egypt, but when in 1807 an attempt 
was made to substitute a British military 
occupation of that country the revived and 
consolidated power of the Turk under that 



220 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

remarkable soldier of Fortune, Muhammad 
Ali, defeated the attempt. 

Friendly relations, however, grew up be- 
tween the new Egyptian dynasty of Muham- 
mad Ali and his successors; and though 
Frenchmen first and Germans later had en- 
couraged Muhammad Ali and his adopted son, 
Ibrahim, to explore and occupy the White 
Nile beyond Khartum, once it had become 
possible by organized transport to reach 
Khartum with comparative ease and to put 
together boats and steamers on the Upper 
Nile, the British, perhaps, became even more 
keenly interested than the French in the 
solution of the Nile mystery. British trading 
consuls like Petherick established themselves 
at Khartum, and by their journeys revealed 
the Bahr-al-Ghazal and the Sobat affluents, 
and discovered that strange bird, the Whale- 
headed Stork (Balceniceps rex). Great sports- 
men, like Sir Samuel Baker, revealed the 
magnificent mammalian fauna of the eastern 
Sudan. At intervals through the first half 
of the nineteenth century, British explorers 
visited Abyssinia; and the Church Missionary 
Society having sought to establish Protestant 
missions in that country, complications finally 
arose which obliged the British government 
to send a military expedition into Abyssinia 
in 1867-68, to rescue a British consul and a 
number of Europeans who were held captive 
by King Theodore, a usurping emperor of 
Ethiopia. 



THE BRITISH WORK IN AFRICA 221 

Amongst the missionaries who had striven 
under the aegis of the Church Missionary 
Society to establish Protestant Christianity 
in Abyssinia, were two natives of Wiirttem- 
berg, Krapf and Rebmann. These men, find- 
ing their attempts at establishing a Protestant 
mission in Abyssinia quite fruitless, sought the 
protection of the sayyid or sultan of Zanzi- 
bar. Already Zanzibar and its continental 
coast-belt had come under the special notice 
of the British government on account of the 
journeys and reports of Henry Salt in 1800- 
1803, and the surveying voyage of Captain 
William F. Owen in 1825; of its growing trade 
with India; and, lastly, an anxiety that the 
French should not establish any hold over 
East Africa which might embarrass the sea- 
route to India. [The Captain — afterwards 
Admiral— Owen here referred to carried out 
between 1820 and 1825 a most remarkable 
survey of the coasts of Africa between Mo- 
ro'cco and the Red Sea, round the Cape of 
Good Hope. For the first time the coast 
of Africa was correctly demarcated and the 
opening up of the great continent to mari- 
time commerce much facilitated.] 

Consequently these German missionaries 
in the employ of an English society received 
some backing from the British agent at Zan- 
zibar, and were able to establish themselves 
on the east coast of Africa near Mombasa. 
Their journeys into the interior enabled them 
not only to discover the snow m.ountains, 



222 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

Kenia and Kilimanjaro, but to hear from 
Arabs and natives of the wonderful inland 
lakes-^-Nyasa,Tanganyika and Victoria Nyanza 
— which they conceived to be one huge inland 
sea. The upward exploration of the Nile 
from Khartum had for a time come to a stop 
in the vicinity of Gondokoro, owing to rapids 
and hostile natives. It therefore occurred 
to great adventurers like Richard Burton 
(then an officer in the Indian army), that the 
best way of reaching the source of the Nile 
might be by a direct journey inland from the 
East Africa coast. 

At first Burton thought of trying a route 
through Somaliland, and chose as his com- 
panion a brother ofiicer, John Hanning Speke, 
The hostility of the Somalis stopped his 
expedition a short distance from the coast. 
Appealing, however, to the Royal Geographi- 
cal Society, Burton and Speke obtained the 
funds for a bigger expedition, and started 
from the mainland opposite Zanzibar. They 
travelled due west, and reached the shores 
of Lake Tanganyika. On the return journey 
Speke made a rapid march to the north and 
discovered the Victoria Nyanza. Another 
expedition, under Speke and Grant, not only 
reached the north-west coast of the Victoria 
Nyanza, but traced the Nile more or less from 
its exit on the north shore of that lake to 
the Albert Nyanza, another lake which had 
just been discovered by Sir Samuel Baker and 
his wife, who, under the most tremendous 



THE BRITISH WORK IN AFRICA 223 

difficulties, had forced their way up the Nile 
from Gondokoro. 

The Nile mystery was solved in the main, 
and it only required the details to be filled 
in by other explorers, a task which was not 
completely accomplished until about 1904. 
As the basin of the White and Mountain Nile 
had been mainly revealed in its geographical 
features by Englishmen, it was not inappro- 
priate that the khedive of Egypt should en- 
trust the equatorial province of the Egyptian 
Sudan to English governors, such as Sir 
Samuel Baker and the celebrated Charles 
George Gordon. In their administration, how- 
ever, they employed officers of various nation- 
ahties, American (Chaille Long), Italian 
(Gessi, Casati), German (Emin Pasha), Aus- 
trian (Slatin Pasha), and numerous Greeks; 
besides Frank Lupton, an Englishman. The 
excellent work done by these Europeans in 
the Egyptian Sudan was brought to naught 
by the crash of the Mahdi's successful revolt 
in 1882. 

The Suez Canal was opened with great 
ceremony in November 1869. Before long 
it intensified the degree of British interest 
in Egypt, because it was used to ever greater 
extent by British shipping; and the safety 
and neutrality of this passage- (nearly one 
hundred miles long) between the Mediter- 
ranean and the Red Sea became an indis- 
pensable link in the communications of the 
British Empire. In 1875 the British govern- 



224 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

merit became a very considerable shareholder 
in the Canal. 

In 1877, conjointly with France, Great 
Britain was obliged to intervene in the finan- 
cial chaos of the Egyptian government. 
This intervention led in time to a native 
revolt under a colonel of the Egyptian army, 
Ahmad Arabi. To restore and affirm the 
khedive's government, a British army under 
Sir Garnet Wolseley (Lord Wolseley of Cairo) 
landed in Egypt in September 1882, and after 
the battle of Tel-el-Kebir achieved this 
purpose. Since then, it has been found 
necessary to continue the British military 
occupation in order to support the khedive's 
government in the great task of re-creating 
the long-vanished prosperity of Egypt. It 
is a matter of common knowledge that the 
supremely difficult task of representing Great 
Britain in Egypt during the anxious and 
critical period between 1883 and 1906 was 
filled by Sir Evelyn Baring (Earl Cromer) 
in a way which has left as deep a mark on 
the history of Egypt as any one of the reigns 
of her greatest Pharaohs or Ptolemies. 

The Anglo-Egyptian Sudan — in full revolt 
after 1882 against the government, or mis- 
government, of the " Turks " (as the negroes 
style the Egyptians) — ^was at first abandoned 
after Viscount Wolseley's futile, though ably 
conducted expedition of 1884-85, and the 
death of General C. G. Gordon in Khartum. 
For thirteen years it was given up to all . the 



THE BRITISH WORK IN AFRICA 225 

horrors and devastations of the Mahdi's rule 
and that of his lieutenant and successor, the 
Khalifa Abdallah. But in 1897-98 it was 
recovered for civilization and for the joint 
rule of Britain and Egypt by Lord Kitchener 
of Khartum and Sir Reginald Wingate. The 
thirteen years of Arab rule in the Egyp- 
tian Sudan (during which more than half 
the population perished, and many districts 
relapsed into desert and thorn scrub), is a 
potent object-lesson for those who wish Africa 
left to herself. 

Among the great feats of peace, or rather 
of warfare with Nature, which have been 
achieved by the British in the Sudan, has 
been the cutting of the sudd — the immense 
accumulation of floating vegetation in the 
sluggish labyrinth of waters of the Bahr-al- 
Ghazal and Mountain Nile. This sudd com- 
pletely blocked, or grievously hindered the 
navigation of these important waterways. 
With its subdual steamers can now penetrate 
from Khartum into the very heart of Africa. 

In Egypt proper, the engineering works 
constructed by British engineers, with the 
co-operation of the khedive's government, 
have multiplied almost a hundredfold the 
cultivable area of Upper and Lower Egypt; 
have not only increased greatly the wealth 
and welfare of the peasantry ; but have caused 
(with other reforms) the population of Egypt 
to have nearly doubled since the beginning 
of the British occupation in 1882. British 

H 



226 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

and French archaeologists (with some Ameri- 
can and German assistance) have restored to 
sight and knowledge forgotten monuments of 
ancient Egyptian art, architecture, religion 
and knowledge. If there is any conscious- 
ness beyond the tomb, many a dead and gone 
Pharaoh, minister-of-state, and high priest 
must be devoutly thankful for the renaissance 
of their glorious country which is being effected 
under the British aegis. 

In succeeding the Dutch as rulers in South 
Africa, the British (assisted by some German 
immigration) soon extended the scope of 
Cape Colony to the Orange River on the 
north. The Boers, who were discontented 
with British rule, together with some adven- 
turous English and German settlers, founded, 
with the consent of Great Britain, two inde- 
pendent republics to the north-east of Cape 
Colony : that of the Orange Free State and of 
the Transvaal (South African Republic). The 
present State of Natal was conquered from the 
Zulus by the Boers, but the coast region was 
simultaneously acquired by Great Britain, and, 
after a short dispute, it became a British colony . 

By 1840 the Orange River and the Lim- 
popo had been more or less laid down on the 
map, but beyond the High Veld, which occu- 
pies the centre of South Africa, lay in one 
direction the Kalahari Desert and in another 
Matabeleland, in the possession of warlike 
and not well-disposed Zulus; and infested 
with the tsetse-fly, which soon killed off the 



THE BRITISH WORK IN AFRICA 227 

oxen and horses of the explorers' transport. 
But the more westerly part of Central South 
Africa was still to a great extent under the 
control of Bechuana chiefs, who were well- 
disposed towards the British (they disliked 
the Dutch), and especially to British mission- 
aries. Through these Bechuana information 
reached settled South Africa of Lake Ngami 
(the size of which was much exaggerated), 
and of flowing rivers and rich forests beyond 
the Kalahari Desert. Amongst the British 
missionaries of that period was David Living- 
stone, sent out by the London Missionary 
Society and established in Bechuanaland. He 
yearned to reach the " regions beyond " with 
dense populations waiting to be christianized. 
He lacked nothing but the funds, and these 
at last were mainly supplied by a generous 
English hunter of big game — William Cotton 
O swell. Livingstone and O swell together 
reached the central Zambezi at Sesheke in 
June 1851. Livingstone then returned, per- 
fected himself in the taking of astronomical 
observations, obtained what funds he could 
from various sources, and made a wonderful 
journey into Central Africa from the south, 
first of all tracing the Zambezi upstream to 
near its source, and discovering the southern- 
most affluents of the Congo, and then cross- 
ing Angola to St. Paul de Loanda. After 
a brief rest in that city he retraced his steps 
to the central Zambezi, and followed that 
stream as far as he was able eastwards until 

H2. 



228 THE OPENmG UP OF AFRICA 

he reached its delta at QueHmane. He had 
thus laid bare the main facts regarding the 
origin and course of the Zambezi. Two or 
three years later he returned with (Sir) John 
Kirk and a large expedition, explored the 
Zambezi from its delta up to the vicinity of 
the Barotse country, and then turned up the 
Shire river and thus discovered Lake Nyasa 
—discovered it so far as scientific geography 
was concerned, though the lake had probably 
been visited several times by Portuguese 
traders in the eighteenth century. 

A third time Livingstone returned to the 
basin of the Zambezi, on this occasion (1866) 
from the Zanzibar coast. He crossed Lake 
Nyasa, resolved to see what lay to the far 
west of that lake, a region where mighty 
rivers and numerous other lakes were reported 
to exist. Thus he discovered Lakes Bang- 
weulu and Mweru, and the south end of Lake 
Tanganyika, and above all, the upper course 
of the Luapula-Lualaba-Congo, which he 
believed to be the head-stream of the Nile, 
dying in that belief near Lake Bangweulu in 
1873. His work was taken up first by the 
man who came to his rescue — Henry Moreton 
Stanley — and secondly by another relief ex- 
pedition under Commander Verney Lovett 
Cameron, R.N. Cameron marched right 
across Central Africa on foot from the Zanzi- 
bar coast to Angola, but did not add very 
much to our knowledge of the great problems 
of African geography. Like Livingstone, he 



THE BRITISH WORK IN AFRICA 229 

was stopped by the falls of the Congo north 
of Nyangwe. 

To these same falls came another man of 
harder grit — afterwards to be known as Sir 
Henry Moreton Stanley, a Welshman by birth. 
Stanley, who had set all doubts at rest regard- 
ing the Victoria Nyanza (by circumnavigat- 
ing the lake), and had begun the discovery 
of the Ruwenzori mountains, determined to 
follow " Livingstone's river " to its outlet in 
the sea; and in spite of almost insuperable 
difficulties — cutting his way through hun- 
dreds of miles of forest and battling with the 
canoe fleets of cannibal tribes — he traced the 
wonderful northern sweep of the majestic, 
lake-like Congo till it curved south-westwards 
to the Crystal Mountains ; and then — hardest 
task of all — struggled over two hundred miles 
of cataracts and rapids till he reached the 
estuary of the river and thus passed out into 
the Atlantic Ocean. 

A few years afterwards, a Scottish explorer, 
Joseph Thomson, marched from the Mombasa 
coast direct to the Victoria Nyanza, discovered 
Lake Baringo and Mount Elgon, and pointed 
the way to further revelations in East African 
geography which were made soon after by 
Austrian and British explorers. The writer 
of this book made treaties in the East Afri- 
can interior, in 1884, which laid the founda- 
tion of the rights of the British East Africa 
Chartered Company. But he and others 
were more or less directed in their ideas or 



230 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

actions by Sir John Kirk, the real originator 
of the British Empire in East Africa. Sir 
John — as Dr. Kirk — had accompanied Living- 
stone on the government expedition to the 
Zambezi and Lake Nyasa in 1859-63. Since 
1866 he had been consul and consul-general 
at Zanzibar, and had striven hard to indoc- 
trinate the Arab government of Zanzibar with 
the right ideas of governing and develop- 
ing the region of East Africa between the 
Indian Ocean and the great lakes. But the 
clash of European ambitions, the entry of 
Germany and Belgium into the field, made 
his plans abortive, and he had to turn instead 
to the securing for British control of the lands 
more especially discovered and opened up by 
British explorers. The East African and 
Uganda Protectorates are the ultimate result 
of his initiative, and of the personal labours of 
H. M. Stanley, Joseph Thomson, F. J. Jack- 
son, Sir Frederick Lugard, Sir Gerald Portal, 
Sir J. R. L. Macdonald, Colonel Roderick 
Owen, Sir Harry Johnston and others : not 
forgetting the Church Missionary Society and 
those who engineered the Uganda railway. 

But the British government and people 
had not neglected through all this wonder- 
ful nineteenth century the geography of West 
and West-central Africa. No sooner had the 
brothers Lander traced the Niger from Busa 
to the sea than one of them returned with 
a commercial expedition which put light- 
draught steamers on the Niger, and opened 



THE BRITISH WORK IN AFRICA 231 

up a vigorous trade with Inner Africa by 
that means. In the 'forties of the nineteenth 
century, a government surveying expedition 
was sent to the Lower Niger, which, though 
it lost many lives from fever and mismanage- 
ment, greatly increased our knowledge of that 
stream. The Benue had been discovered in 
its upper waters by Dr. Heinrich Barth in 
1853. Barth, a native of Hamburg, was the 
only survivor of another scientific expedition 
sent out under Consul James Richardson, by 
the British government, to cross the Sahara 
Desert from Tripoli and explore Central 
Africa. Barth had succeeded in reaching 
Timbuktu, and leaving that city alive had 
helped to fill up gaps in our knowledge of the 
Central Niger, and had immensely increased 
our knowledge of the Nigerian Sudan. 

During the 'sixties occurred a marked 
slackening of interest in West Africa, owing 
to the ravages of malarial fever amongst 
settlers, traders, missionaries and explorers, 
less able than now to understand the secret 
of preserving one's health in the African 
tropics. Yet, during this period, Dr. W. B. 
Baikie did some admirable exploring work 
on the Niger, Benue, and in Hausaland. 
In 1873 occurred the war with Ashanti, and 
British trading interests in West Africa grew 
apace, owing to the need for palm oil occa- 
sioned by the immense development of rail- 
ways and machinery, and the growing 
demand for soap. By 1882 the Niger delta 



232 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

and the Kamerun were ripe for taking under 
the British flag, and though this action was 
deferred till 1884-86 (and thereby the Kame- 
run was lost to Germany) nevertheless most 
aspirations of the few far-sighted men who 
then cared for West Africa were satisfied. 
The creation of a vast British empire over 
Nigeria was largely due to the formation of 
the Royal Niger Chartered Company under 
Sir George Taubman Goldie, and the treaties 
made by that company's agents, one of whom 
was the celebrated Joseph Thomson who 
had laid the foundations of British East 
Africa. Southern Nigeria was added to the 
British Empire between 1884 and 1888 by 
treaties concluded by two consular officials, 
E. H. Hewett and (Sir) H. H. Johnston. The 
blood-stained rule of Benin was extinguished 
(1897) by an expedition under Admiral Sir 
Harry Rawson. At the same time the colo- 
nies of the Gambia, Sierra Leone, and the 
Gold Coast were enlarged very considerably, 
advancing in a few years from mere strips or 
patches on the coast to territories 4000, 29,000, 
and 90,000 square miles in extent, respectively. 
Between 1811 and 1880 the British govern- 
ment in South Africa had to wage several wars 
with the Kafir-Zulu tribes, with the Basuto and 
the Bapedi Bechuana (Northern Transvaal). 
The most serious of these struggles was that 
of the Zulu War (1879-80), after which Zulu- 
land broke up as an independent state and 
was finally annexed to the colony of Natal. 



THE BRITISH WORK IN AFRICA 233 

Nevertheless, the relations between the 
British and the negroes in South Africa must 
on the whole have been favourable to the 
latter, since their numbers have increased 
enormously under British control or rule. 
At the same time, education is spreading 
amongst them in a very notable degree. 

The growth of British interests in South 
Africa led to two wars (1881 and 1899-1902) 
with the Boers, that section of the Dutch- 
speaking colonists who had formed them- 
selves into two independent republics : the 
Orange Free State and the South African Re- 
public. The three-years' war of 1899-1902 
ended in a hard-won victory for the British, 
and, in all probability, a complete settlement 
of the racial question amongst white men in 
South Africa, a settlement by fusion. 

Four British governors played leading parts 
in moulding the destinies of the sub-continent : 
Sir Benjamin Durban, Sir George Grey, Sir 
Bartle Frere and Lord Milner. They made 
mistakes, perhaps, but they laid the founda- 
tions of the mightiest state in Africa of the 
future. V 

The pioneer work of Livingstone in the \ 
more central regions of South Africa had led 
to the establishment of large protectorates 
over what is generally called British Central 
Africa (that region north of the Zambezi and 
south of the Congo basin). Cecil John Rhodes, 
an Englishman who had amassed enormous 
wealth in the diamond and gold mines of 



234 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

South Africa, was one of the chief agencies 
in promoting the expansion of the British 
empire beyond the Limpopo and Bechuana- 
land, though his share in the work has been 
somewhat exaggerated. He contributed a 
good deal of money to the enterprise, but 
was not himself one of the pioneers who 
brought this region under the British flag, 
some of whom worked quite independently 
of Rhodes and his Chartered Company, 
though all were in sympathy with the desire 
to create a British empire across Africa 
which might stretch from the Cape to Cairo. 
The actual consummation of this idea by the 
attempts of Sir Harry Johnston, Sir Alfred 
Sharpe and A. J. Swann to join the protec- 
torates of Uganda and of North-eastern 
Rhodesia was checked by the interposition 
of Germany. 

The sketching-out of the new British 
spheres in Southern and Northern Rhodesia 
and Nyasaland was more or less complete 
by 1890. Then came the difficult task of 
conquest from recalcitrant Zulu and Arab in- 
vaders. In the south and centre the lands 
of the Zambezi basin had been terrorized for 
three-quarters of a century by Zulu hordes, 
chiefly those known as the Matabele and An- 
goni. The last-named were very powerful and 
numerous, but they were decisively beaten 
in 1893 by Sir L. S. Jameson (Dr. Jameson). 
Lake Nyasa and much of the upper Shire was 
more or less in the power of the Arab slave- 



THE BRITISH WORK IN AFRICA 235 

traders and their Muhammadan Yslo allies. 
These were the devastators so strongly de- 
nounced by Livingstone; and the Maskat, 
Persian Gulf and Zanzibar Arabs, by 1879, 
had reached the heart of the Congo basin, and 
were becoming a great power for evil there, 
and also on Tanganyika. On Lake Nyasa their 
dominion was only crushed and rooted out after 
six years of strenuous warfare, wherein Sir 
Harry Johnston with the aid of a force of 
Indian troops and British officers, and officers 
from the Royal Naval Reserve, at last drew 
this thorn from one of Africa's many wounds. 
Sir Alfred Sharpe (who had brought much of 
Central Zambezia under the British flag) 
and Sir William Manning settled the Angoni 
trouble, and completed the organization of 
the Nyasaland protectorate. 

A glance at the map of Africa will show that 
the British people have been amply rewarded 
for their enterprise between 1600 and 1900, 
and have secured British control over a very 
large share of the African continent. Amongst 
them, moreover, have arisen several teachers, 
who have shown very conclusively that the 
annexation of Africa has its duties as well as 
its gains, and that amongst those duties is 
the education of the indigenous peoples and 
the full recognition of what rights they may 
possess to the soil and its products. The 
achievements of British pioneers have been 
stupendous, and already great victories have 
been gained over recalcitrant Nature — such 



236 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

victories as the construction of the railway 
from the shore of the Indian Ocean at 
Mombasa to Uganda, from Lagos on the 
Gulf of Guinea to Kano in the heart of the 
Central Sudan, from Wadi Haifa and from 
the Red Sea to Khartum,from Capetown across 
the Zambezi to the upper waters of the Congo, 
from Freetown in Sierra Leone to the dense 
forests of innermost Liberia : the bridging of 
the Zambezi, the damming of the Nile. But 
these gains have been nearly balanced by 
set-backs, by the appalling growth of African 
diseases, more especially those due to germs. 
The opening up of the continent has carried 
the terrible sleeping sickness from one or two 
patches of Congoland over much of Uganda, 
German East Africa and British Central 
Africa. Similar diseases have swept away the 
greater part of a colony's supply of cattle or 
horses ; locusts, floods and droughts have here 
and there ruined agriculture for a season; but 
slowly the white man is achieving the mastery 
over Nature, to the ultimate benefit of the 
black, brown and yellow men, as well as their 
white-skinned brother : who has been the chief 
agent in the opening up of Africa. 



CHAPTER XII 

BELGIUM, GERMANY, AND ITALY 

f Down till about 1875 the only European 
^ ^ nations who had been actively engaged — as a 



BELGIUM, GERMANY, AND ITALY 237 

national work — in African discovery, were 
Portugal, Holland, France and Britain. Ger- 
mans had been exploring and developing Africa 
from the beginning of the seventeenth century, 
but usually in the pay or under the protection 
of some other nationality — ^Holland, Britain 
or Turkey. But when Cameron returned 
from his journey across Africa the then king 
of the Belgians, Leopold II, attempted to 
form an international association with its 
seat at Brussels for the opening up of Africa, 
and the suppression of the slave-trade. Stan- 
ley's arrival a year or two afterwards with his 
still more amazing discovery of the course 
of the Congo, caused Leopold II to throw 
himself eagerly into African enterprise. With 
the subscriptions he had raised and with 
his own resources he sent out Belgians to ex- 
plore what is now German East Africa, and 
later employed Stanley and many English- 
men to open up the Congo basin under 
the Belgian committee. In this way he was 
successful in creating the huge independent 
state of the Congo, of which he made himself 
sovereign. 

His position in the world and his professions 
deceived every one into believing that his 
enterprise was purely philanthropic, or if it 
had a commercial side, was merely directed 
to the creation of a legitimate trade between 
Belgium and Africa. But probably on ac- 
count of the immense fortunes which were 
being made by Cecil Rhodes and others in 



238 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

the opening up of Africa, he conceived the 
idea of deriving similar wealth from his Congo 
enterprise. To effect this he broke the whole 
pledge and spirit of his contract with the 
Powers, and debased himself in history by the 
exploitation of the position conferred on him 
at the Congress of Berlin. His agents were 
allowed to inflict indescribable misery on 
millions of unhappy savages in the heart of 
the Congo Forest so that Leopold II might 
make a vast fortune out of Congo rubber and 
ivory, a fortune which he spent partly on his 
mistresses and illegitimate children, partly 
on the beautification of Belgian towns, and 
also (it must be admitted) on the promotion 
of scientific research in Africa. Nevertheless, 
in spite of this strange aberration on the part 
of the king of the Belgians, many of his 
officers have done great and good work in 
the opening up of Africa. Captain Storms 
(1882-85) helped to rid the shores of Lake 
Tanganyika of Arab slave-traders; and Baron 
Dhanis, with Belgian and other European 
officers and a negro army, completely de- 
stroyed the newly-founded Arab slave state 
on the Upper Congo, and checked the devasta- 
tion of the Bahr-al-Ghazal by the dervishes 
of the Egyptian Sudan. 
r The Germans have always been interested 
f in African discovery, though it was not until 
1884 that that interest was definitely asso- 
ciated with the creation of German colonies 
and protectorates. In 1884-85 they con- 



BELGIUM, GERMANY, AND ITALY 239 

eluded treaties with African chiefs, which 
together with arbitrary annexations and 
agreements with other European powers gave 
them Togoland (Western Dahome) and the 
Kamerun in Equatorial West Africa; 822,500 
square miles of rather arid, sparsely-inhabited 
land in South-west Africa, and the great domain 
of German East Africa (362,000 square miles). 
German East Africa was mainly founded by 
Dr. Karl Peters, Count Pfeil, Hermann von 
Wissmann, Dr. Franz Stuhlmann and Count 
von Gotzen. The Germans have had the 
usual wars with the natives, and have made 
the mistakes so common in the abrupt contact 
between white and black. But science has 
benefited enormously by the German investi- 
gation of Africa, and it has now become patent 
that the role of Germany in the opening up of 
Africa is to be taken very seriously. She has 
secured a mountainous tract in West Africa — 
Togoland — which is likely to be of great com- 
mercial importance. In the Kamerun there lies 
vegetable and mineral wealth of incalculable 
value ; already diamonds and copper in South- 
west Africa are atoning for lack of rainfall, 
while in German East Africa we are about 
to see a remarkable development in tropical 
agriculture and in the rearing of livestock, 
besides perhaps more diamond-mining. 

Although Germany is only at the com- 
mencement of her task in the development and 
administration of nearly one million square 
miles of African territory, no history of the 



240 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

opening up of Africa would be complete 
without an allusion to the work of individual 
Germans in geographical discovery, ethnolo- 
gical, linguistic, botanical and zoological re- 
search. Germans have been studying Africa 
from the early part of the seventeenth century 
onwards. A good deal of our early know- 
ledge of Abyssinia was obtained through the 
subsidies to German scholars of a duke of 
Saxe-Gotha, reigning about 1640-70. The 
Moravian Church was practically a German 
institution, so, indeed, has been the splendid 
Basel Mission of the Gold Coast, though 
nominally Swiss. At the end of the eighteenth 
and for the first eighty years of the nineteenth 
century, German explorers and missionaries 
frequently worked for the British government 
or for various British scientific, missionary or 
commercial societies. Friedrich Hornemann 
entered the service of the African Association 
in 1796, and made a wonderful journey from 
Tripoli to the Niger, dying in the country of 
Nupe, which he reached first of all Europeans. 
The travels of Barth and Vogel in the employ 
of the British government contributed much 
to our knowledge of North-central Africa. The 
researches of Krapf and Rebmann revealed 
the Snow Mountains of East Africa, and at- 
tracted British explorers in that direction, 
with the ultimate result of the great East 
African protectorates. But Germans also 
went out to Africa for German societies or on 
scientific expeditions, assisted by the German 



BELGIUM, GERMANY, AND ITALY 241 

government. Baron Karl von der Decken, 
a Hanoverian nobleman, in 1861-62, made a 
remarkable survey of Mount Kilimanjaro — the 
very existence of which had been denied since 
Rebmann's discovery — and first advocated 
the foundation of a German colony in the 
Zanzibar dominions. The celebrated Dr. 
Georg Schweinfiirth continued the exploring 
work of Petherick, and practically revealed to 
the world the geography of that south-western 
basin of the Nile, the Bahr-al-Ghazal, besides 
reaching the upper waters of the Welle- 
Mubangi, Karl Mauch explored South-east 
Africa, and, acting on information given by 
the Boers, discovered the wonderful Zimbabwe 
ruins. Next to Stanley, and perhaps Grenfell, 
Germans were the most noteworthy revealers 
of Congo geography, more especially Boehm, 
Pogge, Wolf, von Frangois, and the chiefest of 
them all, the gallant Hermann von Wissmann, 
afterwards the conqueror of German East 
Africa. Amongst such noteworthy German 
contributions to the opening up of Africa 
should not be forgotten the early zoological 
research of M. H. K. Lichtenstein in South 
Africa (1800-10), of Dr. Wilhelm Peters in 
Mozambique (1840-50), and above all the work 
of a great philologist. Dr. W. J. Bleek, a 
Prussian, who became curator of the Library 
at Capetown and who founded the study of the | 
Bantu family of languages. _-~---i 

Italian aspirations perforce have lain in 
regions not greatly coveted by stronger 



242 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

European nations. Italy aspires some day to 
control the Tripolitaine, and restore that 
portion of North Africa to the prosperity and 
welfare it knew under the sway of Greece and 
Rome. Whether Fate will accord her this 
privilege yet remains to be seen. Meanwhile, 
though she has met with many checks, defeats 
and disappointments, she has done much to 
develop the coast-lands of Abyssinia and of 
the eastern Somali country. Her subjects, 
as traders, professional men, agriculturists, and 
artisans, range widely over North and North- 
east Africa from Eastern Algeria and Tunis 
to Egypt, to the coast-lands of the Red Sea 
and of East Africa. 

Greeks also, since the beginning of the 
nineteenth century, have played a consider- 
able part in the commercial development of 
Egypt and of the Egyptian Sudan, and now 
frequent most of the seaports of East Africa. 

CHAPTER XIII 

CHRISTIAN MISSIONS IN AFRICA 

One of the greatest forces in modern times, 
in the opening up of Africa was the invasion 
of that continent by missionaries of the Roman 
and the Protestant Churches of Christianity. 
During the Middle Ages, and down to the 
beginning of the Renaissance, there was only 
one idea in the minds of Christian popes and 
kings : and that was^ to smite the infidel 
with a sword and implant Christianity on 



CHRISTIAN MISSIONS IN AFRICA 243 

Muhammadan Africa and Asia by force. 
The Crusades failed, however, to produce / 

any permanent effect : on the contrary, they / 

rather affected Christianity for the worse 
in Africa and Western Asia, making the j 
Muhammadans more mihtant against the / 
rehgion of Christ. The last crusades, indeed, 
brought about the extirpation of what Latin 
Christianity remained in Tunis and the Greek | 
Christianity of Nubia. j 

But the new birth of science and art in Italy | 
in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries 
led to relations being opened up between the 
Christians of Europe and the non-Christians 
of Asia, and even of North Africa, on more 
genial lines than those of conquest by force \ 
of arms. Italian missionaries of Christianity • 
penetrated to the farthest east through Tartar 
and Mongol hordes, tolerant of new ideas in 
religion. When the great fifteenth century 
drew to a close, and the mariners of Italy, \ 
Spain, Portugal, England and France, were i 
revealing new worlds across the Atlantic and \ 

beyond the Sahara, the propagandist spirit 
of the Roman Church took on the form of 
persuasion rather than alliance with the 
mailed fist. From the close of the fifteenth 
century, missionaries went out in the ships 
of the Spaniards and the Portuguese. 

As early as 1491 Diego Cam conveyed 
priests to the mouth of the Congo, who con- 
verted the vassal chief who ruled the coast 
province of Sonyo and were escorted by this 



244 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

last to the capital of the kingdom of Congo, 
two hundred miles from the coast, which was 
forthwith named the City of the Holy Saviour 
(Sao Salvador). Here the king, queen and 
heir to the throne were baptized with the 
names of the then king, queen and crown 
prince of Portugal. For about a century, the 
Ba-kongo were, superficially, Christians of the 
Roman Church, though they soon mixed the 
elements of their own religion with such 
fragments of Christian dogma as they had 
been able to assimilate. But in the middle 
of the sixteenth century the kingdom of 
Congo was invaded by a devastating horde of 
Jaga warriors (the Ba-jok, or Va-kiokwe), 
and although the Portuguese assisted to expel 
these invaders they became later on suspected 
of wishing to conquer the country for them- 
selves. Consequently, as in the case of the 
Japanese, Christianity became a religion too 
much identified with the pushing European. 
In the eighteenth century French and Italian 
priests attempted to reconquer the western 
Congo for Christianity. But they met with 
indifferent success, and the unhealthy con- 
ditions of life so weakened the mission that 
it gradually died away, leaving finally little 
results behind but the adding of the cross 
and images of the Virgin and Child to the 
numerous fetishes of Congoland. 

Jesuit priests accompanied Portuguese 
military expeditions to the Zambezi and 
the south-east of Africa durin<? the sixteenth 



CHRISTIAN MISSIONS IN AFRICA 245 

century. These priests chiefly directed their 
efforts to the conversion of the still powerful 
empire of Monomotapa, but with relatively 
little success. However, they left their traces 
on Zambezia in the most marked manner, by 
founding settlements during the seventeenth 
and eighteenth centuries on that river, and 
even as far inland as the still little known 
Batonga country, where their former presence 
is attested to this day by the groves of fruit- 
trees which they introduced. Tete, the 
modern capital of Portuguese Zambezia, 
began as a missionary station, and Zumbo, 
at the confluence of the Zambezi and the 
Luangwa, had the same origin. But the 
Jesuit missions in Zambezia came to an end 
when the Portuguese government quarrelled 
with that order in the middle of the eighteenth 
century and expelled its representatives from 
their colonies. 

Abyssinia had remained a Christian king- 
dom so far as the affiliations of its religious 
practices were concerned. It had adopted a 
debased form of Greek Christianity, wholly 
unfitted to be associated with the name and 
teaching of Christ, and remained faithful to 
this creed in spite of the Muhammadan con- 
quest of Egypt, Nubia and Somaliland. In 
1520 the Portuguese dispatched a fleet round 
the Cape of Good Hope and the Red Sea to 
Masawa with an embassy, which remained 
in Abyssinia for six years and was accompanied 
by two priests, Bermudez and Alvares. These 



246 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

two pioneers of the Latin Church strove hard 
to replace the corrupt Greek Christianity of 
Abyssinia by the dogmas and teaching of 
Rome, and therefore aroused a strong oppo- 
sition against all European intervention on 
the part of the native Abyssinian priesthood. 
But for a time the Portuguese dominated the 
councils of the kingdom owing to their trading 
connection between Abyssinia and India. 
Moreover, the Muhammadan forces, partly on 
account of Portuguese doings, were massing 
for the attack of the mountain-kingdom. 
Islam found its champion in a certain Muham- 
mad Granye, a Somali chief who ruled the 
country round about Tajurra Bay (now-a-days 
French Somaliland). Assisted by the Arabs 
of southern Arabia and by the Turks, he 
ravaged the greater part of Abyssinia with 
the deliberate intention of extinguishing for 
ever Christianity in Ethiopia. He would 
probably have succeeded in his purpose but 
for the intervention of the Portuguese, to 
whom the Emperor David of Ethiopia man- 
aged to send emissaries imploring the assist- 
ance of the king of Portugal. The result was 
a wonderful expedition (considering the times, 
and the means of this little kingdom). Four 
hundred Portuguese under the command of 
Cristoforo da Gama landed at Masawa armed 
with firearms, then strange weapons to the 
Muhammadans of North-east Africa. Cristo- 
foro da Gama (son of the celebrated Vasco) was 
an heroic figure, an ideal crusader. With his 



CHRISTIAN MISSIONS IN AFRICA 247 

four hundred Portuguese he inflicted reverse 
after reverse on the thousands of SomaHs and 
Arabs that followed Muhammad Granye, then 
practically master of Abyssinia. Neverthe- 
less, Cristoforo da Gama, badly wounded, 
was captured and beheaded by Muhammad 
Granye. But the few Portuguese heroes 
who remained assisted the emperor of Abys- 
sinia and made a successful stand against 
the Muhammadans, and Muhammad Granye 
was finally killed in battle by a certain 
Pedro Leon, who had been body-servant to 
Cristoforo da Gama. After the death of their 
leader, the Muhammadan forces melted away, 
and Abyssinia was saved — perhaps for ever — 
from inclusion with the states of the Muham- 
madan world, though it must be admitted 
truthfully, that its type of Christianity is 
perhaps a greater bar to progress than the 
faith of Islam. The political importance of 
this achievement of the Portuguese, however, 
is that Abyssinia has generally taken sides 
with the world of Europe in the politics of 
North-east Africa in spite of two serious 
conflicts with civilized powers, namely, the 
British expedition of 1867-68 and the War of 
Independence against Italy in 1896; while, 
on the other hand, the retention of Christi- 
anity as the state religion has done a 
great deal to save the independence of 
Abyssinia by securing the sympathies and 
political intervention of various European 
states. 



248 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

Portuguese missionaries remained in Abys- 
sinia till about 1633, having during the one 
hundred and thirteen years of existence of 
this mission amassed a wonderful amount of 
geographical information regarding the rivers, 
mountains, lakes, fauna and flora of that coun- 
try. But they were never cordially received 
by the Abyssinians, partly out of suspicion as 
to the political intentions of Portugal, and 
partly because their Latin Christianity was 
so alien to the debaucheries of the Abyssinian 
priests. 

From one cause and another, chiefly the 
dislike to the order of the Jesuits on the part 
of most European Powers, Rome grew dis- 
heartened about the conversion of Africa at 
the close of the eighteenth century. South 
Africa had come into the possession of the 
Dutch, who in those days were vehemently 
opposed to Catholicism. They had also taken 
from Portugal several footholds on the coast 
of Guinea from which Catholic missionaries 
once started on their despairing task of con- 
verting brutish negroes, whose chiefs in 
those days were entirely absorbed in the 
profitable slave-trade. It was now the turn 
of the Protestant Churches to attempt to 
spread Christianity amongst the coloured races 
of Asia, Africa and America. The great 
Moravian Church started on its wonderful 
career as a missionary body in 1732. With 
the permission of the Dutch it began to 
evangelize the Hottentots at the Cape of 



CHRISTIAN MISSIONS IN AFRICA 249 

Good Hope about 1735, and astonished the 
Dutchmen by insisting on treating these un- 
fortunate serfs as fellow-men fitted for baptism. 
The British Wesleyan Church commenced 
work at Sierra Leone in 1787 as soon as that 
settlement of freed slaves was established. 
The British occupation of Sierra Leone gave 
another tremendous impetus to Protestant 
propagandist work. It brought about the 
creation of the London Missionary Society 
(1795) and the Edinburgh and Glasgow Mis- 
sionary Societies (1796-97). In the closing 
year of the eighteenth century the Church 
Missionary Society was founded. All these 
four bodies, in addition to the Wesleyans, 
began sending missionaries to Sierra Leone 
and the adjoining parts of West Africa. 

The final occupation and eventual purchase 
of Cape Colony, which began in 1806, launched 
these missionary bodies on to South Africa, 
with results that can only be described as 
tremendous in the opening up of the con- 
tinent; for the missionaries paid little heed 
to the remonstrances and advice of stiff- 
necked military governors. They entered 
with wonderful rapidity into amicable rela- 
tions with the native tribes, who had hitherto 
only looked upon the white man as a deadly 
foe. Almost as by magic, a few years after 
landing they appear as the advisers and 
ministers of powerful native chiefs beyond 
the limits of the explored country. The 
Kaffirs offered no opposition whatever to 



250 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

Christian propaganda, whether they agreed 
with it or not. They grasped at the Wesley- 
an, the Presbyterian, the Congregationahst 
and the Church of England missionaries as 
men who would educate their young people, 
who would introduce a wholesome form of 
trade, and would stand their friends in the 
arguments with the Dutch, German and Irish 
settlers, and the hot-tempered, autocratic 
military governors. The missionaries soon 
got beyond the sickly Hottentots and furtive 
Bushmen, amongst the big, black, Bantu 
negroes and the regions along the Orange and 
Vaal Rivers and far up into Bechuanaland 
on the healthy open veld with its half-dried 
streams. The nineteenth century was not 
very old before they had established them- 
selves amongst the warlike Zulus. In fact, 
their journeys northwards were only checked 
by the prevalence of the tsetse-fly, of malarial 
fever, and the harsh desert conditions of the 
Kalahari. 

The wonderful travels of David Livingstone 
have been already alluded to, and need not 
further be described here, except to say that 
Livingstone's verbal attack on the Arab 
slave-trade in Central Africa led directly to 
the extirpation of that devastating agency. 
After the death of Livingstone, in 1873, there 
was a great outburst of zeal on the part 
of the Protestant Churches of Britain and 
Ireland, especially in Scotland. This resulted 
in the re-creation of missionary settlements 



CHRISTIAN MISSIONS IN AFRICA 251 

in Nyasaland which led to the establishment 
of a protectorate over that region. Similarly, 
the pioneer work of the Church Missionary 
Society in Uganda led to the Uganda pro- 
tectorate, and the agents of the same society 
did much to bring about the foundation of 
British control over Northern and Southern 
Nigeria. 

French Protestant missions civilized, with 
the happiest results, Barotseland, the region 
of the Upper Zambezi. American Protestant 
missions did a little to open up Liberia, and 
still more to explore the French territory of 
the Gabun. Here, in 1847, they discovered 
the gorilla. Other American Protestant mis- 
sionaries have done much to bring civiliza- 
into the southern and central parts of Angola. 
The work of Catholic and Protestant mission- 
aries in the Congo basin (the French Catholics 
have also done much work in Uganda and on 
Lake Tanganyika) was the great counterpoise 
to the unscrupulous conduct of King Leopold 
11. The greatest amongst all these Congo 
missionaries in the opening up of Africa was 
George Grenfell, a member of the British 
Baptist Missionary Society, and a man in 
many respects parallel to Livingstone. It 
was mainly through the complaints and 
remonstrances of these Protestant mission- 
aries — ^American, Swedish and British — in the 
basin of the Congo, that the misdeeds of 
King Leopold's eoncessionnaire companies 
were brought to light; and proclaimed to the 



252 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

world by the unwearied efforts of Mr. E. D. 
Morel, who, although not a missionary him- 
self, has been a very potent force in moulding 
public opinion in the direction of respect for 
the rights of the natives of the soil. Another 
" lay missionary " of British nationality 
was Mary Kingsley, whose views, though 
occasionally erratic, had a far-reaching effect 
in arousing sympathy and even respect for 
at any rate a proportion of the native customs, 
beliefs, and for the attempts of the negro to 
cope with the vast difficulties of his African 
surroundings. 

Posterity will realize the value of Christian 
mission work in Africa during the eighteenth 
and nineteenth centuries, not only in ethics 
but in contributions to science, more especi- 
ally to geography, ethnology, zoology, and, 
above all, the study of African languages. 



CHAPTER XIV 

COMMERCIAL DEVELOPMENT 

By the year 1911 there remained very 
little of the surface of Africa which had been 
completely unexplored, except in the sandiest 
parts of the Sahara and Libyan deserts, in 
the mountain range of Tibesti and in southern 
Galaland; and in all probability no new human 
tribe, no new mammal, bird, reptile, or fresh- 
water fish of importance, or striking noveltv, 



COMMERCIAL DEVELOPMENT 253 

will be discovered in further investigations. 
But we may expect many startling revela- 
tions in the ancient history of African men 
and beasts by the digging up of fossil or 
archaeological remains. In fact, the scientific 
study of Africa, past and present, is only just 
commencing. 

The real commercial development of the 
neglected continent scarcely took place before 
the 19th century. Prior to that era, the com- 
merce of Africa mainly consisted in the export 
of slaves and of a little gold from the Gold 
Coast and Senegal; gum from the western 
Sahara and Egypt ; ambergris from the Atlan- 
tic coasts; ivory from West, South, and East 
Africa; leather and hides from West Africa; 
salt from the western Sahara ; pepper and 
spice, dye-woods, indigo and ebony from 
West Africa, and ostrich feathers from 
Morocco, Tripoli, Egypt and Cape Colony ; 
besides sugar from Mauritius and Bourbon. 

To the African Association, founded in 
England in 1788, is due enormous credit for 
its persevering efforts to create a legitimate 
commerce in the natural and cultivated pro- 
ducts of Africa which might take the place of 
a trade in slaves. From the initiatory work 
of this association started the trade in palm 
oil, and in the oil from the kernels of the Oil- 
palm (Elais) which has gone far to make the 
fortune of West Africa. There followed the 
increased export of dye-woods {Baphia genus), 
of castor oil, ^esamum oil, benniseed oil, in- 
digo, cotton, ground-nuts, timber (from West 



254 THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA 

Africa), karita or Shea vegetable butter, kola 
nuts, piassava (Raphia) and Sanseviera fibre, 
rubber (Landolphia, Funtumia, Clitandra and 
Carpodinus), tobacco (Egypt, Tunis, Nyasa- 
land, South Africa), maize (Egypt, West and 
South Africa), fruit (West Africa, South 
Africa, Canary Islands, Algeria), gold from 
South and South-central Africa and from the 
Gold Coast and Egypt, Madagaskar and the 
North-east Congo, tin from Nigeria, hematite 
iron (South Africa), copper from South-west 
Africa and South Congoland, diamonds from 
South and South-west Africa and from Liberia, 
emeralds from Egypt, petroleum from Egypt 
and Nigeria, and phosphates from Tunis, 
Algeria and East Africa. The Africa of the 
twentieth century also exports an increasing 
quantity of dates (Morocco to Tripoli), cotton 
(Egypt, East and West Africa), sugar (Egypt, 
Mauritius), coffee (Mauritius, Seychelles, Abys- 
sinia, Liberia, Nyasaland, Congo), cacao (West 
Africa), barley (North Africa), hides and skins 
(Madagaskar; East, West, and South Africa), 
and ostrich feathers (South Africa, Egypt). 

When the difficulties of its climate and its 
germ diseases are better understood and over- 
come Africa may turn out to be the richest 
continent in the world. 



GLOSSARY 



Mauretania is the name given to all that part of North Africa 
north of the Sahara Desert, which includes Morocco, Algeria, 
Timis and Tripoli. In Eoman times the name was limited to 
what we now call Morocco. 

Malaysia indicates the Malay Peninsula and the great islands of 
tlie Malay Archipelago. 

Muslim, Islam — Muhammadan, Muhammadanism. 

West Africa — All that part of Africa south of the courses of the 
Senegal and Niger rivers and west of the longitude of the 
Congo mouth. 

Senegambia —The region between the courses of the Senegal and 
Gambia rivers, 

Guinea — in the narrowest sense, the coast belt between: the 
Gambia river and Liberia. 

Sudan — The region of Negro Africa north of the great equatorial 
forest belt and south of the Sahara and Libyan deserts and 
west of Abyssinia aud Galaland. 

Teda or TiBU — ^A negroid people of semi-Caucasian physique 
inhabiting the regions of the Sahara Desert between Fezznn 
and Lake Chad. The Kanuri of Bornu are allied to them in 
language. 

Angoni — The Zulu-speaking tribes north of the Zambezi. 

Libyans — The more or less white-skinned people of North Africa 
from western Egypt to the Atlantic coast of the Sahara who 
speak Libyan languages. The Libyans are nowadays divided 
into two groups, the semi-nomad Tuareg of the desert and 
the settled agricultural Berbers of North Africa. 

Negrito — The dwarfish ancient negro type (now extinct) of 
Lower Egypt and North (perhaps also South and Central) 
Africa : more nearly related to the Asiatic negritoes of the 
present day. 

Bushongo — A remarkable civilized negro people dwelling in the 
centre of Congoland, between the Sankuru and the Kasai. 

Barbary — The general designation of North Africa (Morocco to 
TripoU) under Muhammadan rule between the twelfth aud 
the nineteenth centuries. 



255 



Jill 



4 



^W'/ 



